Hereditary traits.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hereditary traits. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ie\v\ So far as could be learned, Andrian was the first in whom this 'wonderful hirsuteness had been noticed. Neither his reputed father nor his mother presented any peculiarity of the kind, and a brother and sister of his, who are still living, are in no way remarkable for capillary development. The son Fedor, who was exhibited in company with Andrian, was illegitimate,-and about three years of age. Andrian’s legitimate chil- dren, a son and a daughter, both died young. Nothing is known of the former; but the daughter resembled the father. “Fedor is a sprightly child,” said the account from which we have already quoted, “ and appears more intelligent than the father. The growth of down on his face is not so heavy as to conceal his features, but there is no doubt that when the child comes to maturity he will be at least as hirsute as his parent. The hairs are as white and as soft as the fur of the Angora cat, and are longest at the outer angles of the eyes. There is a thick tuft between the eyes, and the nose is well covered. The moustache joins the whiskers on each side, after the English fashion, and this circumstance gives to accurate pic- tures of the child a ludicrous resemblance to a well-fed Englishman of about fifty. As in the father’s case, the inside of Fedor’s nostrils and ears has a thick crop of hair.” “ Both father and son are almost toothless, Andrian having only five teeth, one in the upper jaw and four in the lower, while the child has only four teeth, all in the lower jaw. In both cases the four lower teeth are all incisors. To the right of Andrian’s one upper tooth there still remains the mark of another which has disappeared. That beyond these six teeth the man never had any others is evident to anyone who feels the gums with the finger.” The deficiency of teeth, accompanied as it is by what is in reality a deficiency not a redundancy of hair—for Andrian and his son have no real hair—accords well with Darwin’s view, that a constant correlation exists between hair and teeth. He mentions as an illustration the deficiency of teeth in hairless dogs. The tusks of the boar, again, are greatly reduced under domestication, and the reduction is accompanied by a corresponding diminution of the bristles. Fie mentions also the case of Julia Pastrana, a Spanish dancer or opera singer, who had a thick masculine beard and a hairy forehead, while her teeth were so redundant that her mouth projected, and her face had a gorilla-like appearance. It should rather be said that in general those creatures which present an abnormal development in the covering of their skin, whether in the way of redundancy or deficiency, present generally, perhaps always, an abnormal dental development, as we see in sloths and armadilloes on the one hand, which have the front teeth deficient, and in some branches of the whale family on the other, in which the teeth are redundant either in number or in size. In individual members of the human family it certainly is not always the case that the development of the hair and that of the teeth are directly correlated; for some who are bald when quite young have excellent teeth, and some who have lost, most of their