be of Hyabites living in Arabia are very numerous and
confine their marriages to their tribe. They all have 24 digits, and
infants born with the normal number are sacrificed as being the
offspring of adultery. The inhabitants of the village of Eycaux in
France, at the end of the last century, had nearly all supernumerary
digits either on the hands or feet. Being isolated in an inaccessible
and mountainous region, they had for many years intermarried and thus
perpetuated the anomaly. Communication being opened, they emigrated or
married strangers and the sexdigitism vanished. Maupertuis recalls the
history of a family living in Berlin whose members had 24 digits for
many generations. One of them being presented with a normal infant
refused to acknowledge it. There is an instance in the Western United
States in which supernumerary digits have lasted through five
generations. Cameron speaks of two children in the same family who were
polydactylic, though not having the same number of supernumerary
fingers.

Smith and Norwell report the case of a boy of fifteen both of whose
hands showed webbing of the middle and ring fingers and accessory
nodules of bone between the metacarpals, and six toes on each foot. The
boy's father showed similar malformations, and in five generations 21
out of 28 individuals were thus malformed, ten females and 11 males.
The deformity was especially transmitted in the female line.

Instances of supernumerary thumbs are cited by Panaroli, Ephemerides,
Munconys, as well as in numerous journals since. This anomaly is not
confined to man alone; apes, dogs, and other lower animals possess it.
Bucephalus, the celebrated horse of Alexander, and the horse of Caesar
were said to have been cloven-hoofed.

Hypertrophy of the digits is the result of many different processes,
and true hypertrophy or gigantism must be differentiated from
acromegaly, elephantiasis, leontiasis, and arthritis deformans, for
which distinction the reader is referred to an article by Park. Park
also calls attention to the difference between acquired gigantism,
particularly of the finger and toes, and another condition of
congenital gigantism, in which either after or before birth there is a
relatively disproportionate, sometimes enormous, overgrowth of perhaps
one finger or two, perhaps of a limited portion of a hand or foot, or
possibly of a part of one of the limbs. The best collection of this
kind of specimens is in the Colle