INHERITABLE?

How, it may be inquired, is it in regard to the inheritance of parts
mutilated and altered by injuries and disease during the life of either
parent? In some cases mutilations have been practised for many
generations, without any inherited result. Different races of men have
knocked out their upper teeth, cut off the joints of their fingers, made
immense holes through their ears and nostrils, and deep gashes in
various parts of their bodies, and yet there is no reason for supposing
that these mutilations have been inherited. The _Comprachicos_, a
hideous and strange association of men and women, existed in the
seventeenth century, whose business it was to buy children and make of
them monsters. Victor Hugo, in a recent work, has graphically told how
they took a face and made of it a snout, how they bent down growth,
kneaded the physiognomy, distorted the eyes, and in other ways
disfigured 'the human form divine,' in order to make fantastic
playthings for the amusement of the noble-born. But history does not
state that these deformities were inherited; certainly no race of
monsters has resulted. The pits from small-pox are not inherited, though
many successive generations must have been thus pitted by that disease
before the beneficent discovery of the immortal Jenner. Children born
with scars left by pustules have had small-pox in the womb, acquired
through the system of the mother. On the other hand, the lower animals,
cats, dogs, and horses, which have had their tails and legs artificially
altered or injured, have produced offspring with the same condition of
parts. A man who had his little finger on the right hand almost cut off,
and which in consequence grew crooked, had sons with the same finger on
the same hand similarly crooked. The eminent physiologist Dr.
Brown-Sequard mentions, that many young guinea-pigs inherited an
epileptic tendency from parents which had been subjected to an operation
at his hands resulting in the artificial production of fits; while a
large number of guinea-pigs bred from animals which had not been
operated on were not thus affected. At any rate, it cannot but be
admitted that injuries and mutilations which cause disease, are
occasionally inherited. But many cases of deformities existing at birth,
as hare-lip, are not due to inheritance, although present in the father.
They arise from a change effected in the child while in the womb,
through an impression made upon the mind