Guinea Pig Toes

Not for 100 million years has a normal guinea pig had five toes on each foot. It has had four toes on each front paw, three toes on each hind paw, a total of fourteen.

In this decade, however, guinea pigs acquired a great & good friend--Professor Sewall Wright of the University of Chicago, who looks after & at 8,000 of them. They support an evolutionary hypothesis which Professor Wright has long maintained, to the effect that inbreeding in freaks generates freaks. Eventually descendant freaks may be numerous enough to be considered a normal race. To gain evidence for this thought Professor Wright has inbred his guinea pigs for 30 generations.

Last week to a group of Chicago zoologists Professor Wright urged that his hypothesis was correct. He had nursed a thread-like toe on a freak guinea pig into regular, tweakable toes on its descendants. Members of that race now regularly have 19 toes. One has 44.

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