Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/154

150 Perhaps the most interesting feature of the ductless glands is their correlation with the sexual function. It is plain that, except as generic types, these categories have no special application to normal humanity. The dunce's cap is surely ready for him who confuses physiological tendency with individual morality, in each case an artificial inhibition put upon reaction to stimuli. Aside from the other correlations, diminished sexual power is common to the two main groups of pituitary disorders, acromegaly and sexual obesity or infantilism. The acromegalics have been likened to the Neanderthal man, who was probably, as the gorillas are, hyperpituitary (Keith), to eunuchs, who are excessively tall when not over-corpulent, and to the tall, raw-boned, heavy-jawed peoples of the northern countries who are often sexually cold. The obese infantile patients of the Fröhlich type, on the other hand, suggest the fat boys of the Pickwick Papers and the large hotels, and the eunuchoid "Lobengulas" described by Sir Jonathan Hutchinson. Even in folk-lore, obesity always connotes sexual frigidity. In a recent view of Dr. Leonard Guthrie, the autopsy of the great Napoleon at St. Helena indicates that the corpulence of his later years, his gradual loss of intellectual keenness, his general fat-headedness from the time of the Russian Campaign, may have been due to the onset of a pituitary obesity, the dystrophia adiposo-genitalis of Mohr and Fröhlich. The logical opposite of the acromegalics are therefore, not the fat patients of the Mohr-Fröhlich type, but the short, swarthy, goat legged achondroplasics who often exhibit great muscular strength, unusual sexual precocity and general salacity. These have been assimilated to the satyrs of mythology to the short, swarthy, troglodyte peoples such as the Iberians, or the Euskarians, the primitive inhabitants of Britain, to "the short-limbed children, of precocious sexuality," and particularly the "forward female children, with full busts, already boasting of their affairs," who are so common on the streets of modern cities. It was not without reason that the Greeks represented the great god Pan as a goatish individual. Except in the negro the generic sexual type, the differential characters of which are harped upon even in the plays of Dumas fils, is short, swarthy, muscular; the frigid type, of high pituitary index, is either flabby and obese (the kühle Blonde of the Germans) or the lank, raw-boned acromegalic. It is said that many achondroplasic dwarfs of history, like Sir Geoffrey Hudson, were of the salacious type. The records of the obstetric clinics show that female achondroplasics, married or unmarried, have sometimes undergone the operation of Cæsarean section three or four times