dealer with whom he discussed the question of the possible origin of the
dancer maintained that it came from Peru, where it nests in the full
cotton capsules, arranging the cotton fibers in the form of a nest by
running about among them in small circles. Hence the name cotton mouse is
sometimes applied to it. Haacke himself believes, however, that the race
originated either in China or Japan as the result of systematic
selectional breeding. Of this he has no certainty, for he states that he
failed to find any literature on the "beautiful mice of China and Japan."
Whether Haacke's description of the dancing mouse was published elsewhere
previous to its appearance in Brehm's "Tierleben" I am unable to state; I
have found nothing written on the subject by him before 1890. Zoth (31 p.
176) also thinks that the race was developed by systematic breeding, or in
other words, that it is a product of the skill of the Asiatic animal
breeders.

Another account of the origin of the race is that accepted by Kishi (21 p.
481) and some other Japanese biologists. It is their belief that the forms
of movement acquired by the individual as the result of confinement in
narrow cages are inherited. Thus centuries of subjection to the conditions
which Kishi has described (p. 6) finally resulted in a race of mice which
breed true to the dance movement. It is only fair to add, although Kishi
does not emphasize the fact, that in all probability those individuals in
which the dancing tendency was most pronounced would naturally be selected
by the breeders who kept these animals as pets, and thus it would come
about that selectional breeding would supplement the inheritance of an
acquired character. Few indeed will be willing to accept this explanation
of the origin of the dancer so long as the inheritance of acquired
characters remains, as at present, unproved.

Still another mode of origin of the mice is suggested by the following