The Dancing Mouse | Page 8

reports that he found a litter of young wood mice (Mus sylvaticus L.) which behaved much as do the spotted dancers of China. He also observed, among a lot of true dancers, a gray individual which, instead of spinning around after the manner of the race, turned somersaults at frequent intervals. It is Kammerer's opinion, as a result of these observations, that the black and white dancers of China and Japan have been produced by selectional breeding on the basis of this occasional tendency to move in circles. Among albino mice Rawitz (25 p. 238) has found individuals which whirled about rapidly in small circles. He states, however, that they lacked the restlessness of the Chinese dancers. Some shrews (Sorex vulgaris L.) which exhibited whirling movements and in certain other respects resembled the dancing mouse were studied for a time by Professor H?cker of Freiburg in Baden, according to a report by von Guaita (17 p. 317, footnote). Doctor G. M. Allen of Cambridge has reported to me that he noticed among a large number of mice kept by him for the investigation of problems of heredity[1] individuals which ran in circles; and Miss Abbie Lathrop of Granby, Massachusetts, who has raised thousands of mice for the market, has written me of the appearance of an individual, in a race which she feels confident possessed no dancer blood, which whirled and ran about in small circles much as do the true dancers.
[Footnote 1: Allen, G.M. "The Heredity of Coat Color in Mice." Proc. Amer. Academy, Vol. 40, 59-163, 1904.]
Although it is possible that some of these cases of the unexpected appearance of individuals with certain of the dancer's peculiarities of behavior may have been due to the presence of dancer blood in the parents, it is not at all probable that this is true of all of them. We may, therefore, accept the statement that dancing individuals now and then appear in various races of mice. They are usually spoken of as freaks, and, because of their inability to thrive under the conditions of life of the race in which they happen to appear, they soon perish.
Another and a strikingly different notion of the origin of the race of dancers from those already mentioned is that of Cyon (11 p. 443) who argues that it is not a natural variety of mouse, as one might at first suppose it to be, but instead a pathological variation. The pathological nature of the animals is indicated, he points out, by the exceptionally high degree of variability of certain portions of the body. According to this view the dancing is due to certain pathological structural conditions which are inherited. Cyon's belief raises the interesting question, are the mice normal or abnormal, healthy or pathological? That the question cannot be answered with certainty off-hand will be apparent after we have considered the facts of structure and function which this volume presents.
Everything organic sooner or later is accounted for, in some one's mind, by the action of natural selection. The dancing mouse is no exception, for Landois (22 p. 62) thinks that it is the product of natural selection and heredity, favored, possibly, by selectional breeding in China. He further maintains that the Chinese dancer is a variety of _Mus musculus L._ in which certain peculiarities of behavior appear because of bilateral defects in the brain. This author is not alone in his belief that the brain of the dancer is defective, but so far as I have been able to discover he is the only scientist who has had the temerity to appeal to natural selection as an explanation of the origin of the race.
Milne-Edwards, as quoted by Schlumberger (29 p. 63), is of the opinion that the Chinese dancer is not a natural wild mouse race, but instead the product of rigid artificial selection. And in connection with this statement Schlumberger describes a discovery of his own which seems to have some bearing upon the problem of origin. In an old Japanese wood carving which came into his possession he found a group of dancing mice. The artist had represented in minute detail the characteristics of the members of the group, which consisted of the parents and eight young. The father and mother as well as four of the little mice are represented as white spotted with black. Of the four remaining young mice, two are entirely black and two entirely white. The two pure white individuals have pink eyes, as has also the mother. The eyes of all the others are black. From these facts Schlumberger infers that the dancer has resulted from the crossing of a race of black mice with a race of albinos; the two original types appear among the offspring in the carving.
Experimental studies of the inheritance of