Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/539

Rh other great painters, and the athletic, acrobatic and humoristic dwarfs of our vaudeville shows.

Among the ancient Romans, it was customary to test the increase in the girth of a young woman's neck, in connection with defloration or pregnancy, by measurement with a thread, as indicated in the lines of Catullus:

 Non illam nutrix oriente luce revisens Hesterno collum poterit circumdare filo,

but there is no evidence that they associated this cervical enlargement with the thyroid gland. Endemic goiter, however, was so well known in antiquity that Juvenal (XIII, 162) has preserved its commonplace aspects in a single line: "Qais tumidum guttur miratus in Alpibus" ("Who wonders at goiter in the Alps?"); and Pliny, in his Natural History (XL 68), hinted at one theory of its causation when he said that "only men and swine are subject to swellings in the throat, which are mostly caused by the noxious quality of the water they drink." In the sixteenth century Paracelsus found goiter to be endemic in the Salzburg region, again attributed it to metallic and mineral constituents in the water, and noticed that it coexisted with another disease of the same locality, cretinism or myxœdema. While goiter is not a necessary characteristic of idiots (proprium stultorum), says Paracelsus, yet it is most commonly found among them (so trifft es die am meisten) after which, he wanders off into his usual astrological theories, in which few can follow him. The important point is that in goitrous regions, as Dock says, cretins may have goitrous mothers while the marriage of two cretins is usually sterile, which makes the observation of Paracelsus fit in very well with his main theory of the provenance of idiots (generatio stultorum).

In 1614 Felix Plater, another Swiss physician, published an observation which seems truly modern, an autopsy of an infant who had died from enlargement of the thymus gland ("thymus-death").

As we begin to perceive the relation of these varied phenomena to the glands of internal secretion, it will not seem strange that Bordeu, who-first stated the modern theory, should have hit upon the sexual gonads as the most obvious illustration, for nearly all these glands are in some way connected with the sexual characteristics of the individual. We may now pass from the stage of hap-hazard observations to that in which certain diseases were closely and accurately described, like objects in natural history, and it is worthwhile to range these in