'
"In most of the cases of inheritance recorded by Brown-Sequard only
one of the two parents had been operated upon and was affected. He
concludes by expressing his belief that 'what is transmitted is the
morbid state of the nervous system,' due to the operation performed
on the parents."
Mr. Darwin proceeds to give other instances of inherited effects of
mutilations:-
"With the horse there seems hardly a doubt that exostoses on the
legs, caused by too much travelling on hard roads, are inherited.
Blumenbach records the case of a man who had his little finger on
the right hand almost cut off, and which in consequence grew
crooked, and his sons had the same finger on the same hand similarly
crooked. A soldier, fifteen years before his marriage, lost his
left eye from purulent ophthalmia, and his two sons were
microphthalmic on the same side."
The late Professor Rolleston, whose competence as an observer no one
is likely to dispute, gave Mr. Darwin two cases as having fallen
under his own notice, one of a man whose knee had been severely
wounded, and whose child was born with the same spot marked or
scarred, and the other of one who was severely cut upon the cheek,
and whose child was born scarred in the same place. Mr. Darwin's
conclusion was that "the effects of injuries, especially when
followed by disease, or perhaps exclusively when thus followed, are
occasionally inherited.
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