In regard to Brown-Séquard’s statements, made in the 3d and the 4th paragraphs, in respect to the results of the operation of cutting the cervical sympathetic, Romanes had not confirmed the results when his manuscript went to press; but soon afterward, after Romanes’ death, a note was printed in _Nature_ by Dr. Hill, announcing that two guinea-pigs from Romanes’ experiment had been born, “both of which exhibited a well-marked droop of the upper eyelid. These guinea-pigs were the offspring of a male and female in both of which I had produced for Dr. Romanes, some months earlier, a droop of the left upper eyelid by division of the left cervical sympathetic nerve. This result is a corroboration of the series of Brown-Séquard experiments on the inheritance of acquired characters.”
Romanes states that he also found that injury to a particular spot of the restiform bodies is quickly followed by a protrusion of the eye on the same side, and further, that he had “also had many cases in which some of the progeny of parents thus affected have shown considerable protrusion of the eyeballs of both sides, and this seemingly abnormal protrusion has occasionally been transmitted to the next generation. Nevertheless, I am far from satisfied that this latter fact is anything more than an accidental coincidence.” This reservation is made on the ground that the protrusion in the young is never so great as in the parents, and also because there is amongst guinea-pigs a considerable amount of individual variation in the degree of prominence of the eyeballs. Romanes, while unwilling to deny that an “obviously abnormal amount of protrusion, due to the operation, may be inherited in lesser degree,” is also unwilling to affirm so important a conclusion on the basis of these experiments alone.
In regard to Brown-Séquard’s 6th statement, Romanes found after injury to the restiform body that hæmatoma and dry gangrene may supervene, either several weeks after the operation, or at any subsequent time, even many months afterward. The disease usually affects the upper parts of both ears, and may then gradually extend downward until nearly the whole ear is involved. “As regards the progeny of animals thus affected in some cases, but by no means in all, a similarly morbid state of the ears may arise apparently at any time in the life history of the individual. But I have observed that in cases where two or more individuals _of the same litter_ develop this diseased condition, they usually do so at about the same time, even though this may be months after birth, and therefore after the animals are fully grown.” Moreover, the morbid process never extends so far in the young as it does in the parents, and “it almost always affects the middle third of the ear.” Several of the progeny from this first generation, which had apparently inherited the disease, but had not themselves been directly operated upon, showed a portion of the ear consumed apparently by the same disease. Romanes then gives the following significant analysis of this result. Since a different part of the ear of the progeny is affected, and also a “very much less quantity thereof,” it might seem that the result was due either to a mere coincidence, or to the transmission of microbes. But he goes on to say, that he fairly well excluded both of these possibilities, for, in the first place, he has never observed “the very peculiar process in the ears, or in any other parts of guinea-pigs which have neither themselves had the restiform bodies injured, nor been born of parents thus mutilated.” In regard to microbes, Romanes tried to infect the ears of normal guinea-pigs by first scarifying these parts, and then rubbing them with the diseased surfaces of the ears of affected guinea-pigs. In not a single case was the disease produced.