Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/155

Rh. The amazing fertility of achondroplasic women has been emphasized in the statistical or biometrical investigations of Karl Pearson, and that this type connotes extreme sexuality is borne out by the observations of Pierre Marie and his co-workers at the Salpêtrière. Crookshank maintains that "the Bengalee is pretty much in the same state as a sufferer from a forma frusta of exophthalmic goitre; while the pigmentation and genital gigantism of the negro are suggestive of adrenal assertion." He further points out that "certain genital malformations or abnormities are almost always accompanied by adrenal tumors; and Iscovesco has shown that adrenal lipoids when administered hypodermically rapidly produce genital overgrowth." On very slender evidence, achondroplasia has been correlated by some observers with disease of the pineal body (epiphysis cerebri), which Descartes regarded as the seat of the soul. Disease of the pineal in young children sometimes results in increased development of the sexual organs with corresponding growth and mental precocity, whence it is inferred that the pineal secretion inhibits growth, particularly the development of the reproductive glands.

Of the internal secretions of the pancreas and the sexual glands, the thyroid, parathyroid, suprarenal and pituitary bodies, considerable is known; less of the spleen, carotid gland and pineal body (epiphysis cerebri); of the "parathymoid" and the paraphysis of the brain, nothing whatever. The vast amount of recent investigation on the subject has been well summed up in the treatises of Sajous (1903), Arthur Biedl (1910), Swale Vincent (1912) and Wilhelm Falta (1913) on the internal secretions, and such individual monographs as those of Friedleben on the thymus (1858), von Eiselsberg on the thyroid (1901) and Gushing on the pituitary (191-). All these are liberally provided with bibliographies, Cushing's book being a model in this respect, and Gushing and Falta give splendid illustrations. Gushing's work, which a competent critic has pronounced to be the most important American monograph on a surgical subject printed in the last ten years, is also a genuine contribution to internal medicine. With John Hunter the surgeon began to be, not only an experimental physiologist and pathologist, but also a clinical observer. Modern medicine affords many examples of original descriptions of new diseases by surgeons, in particular, Sir James Paget and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, whose "Archives of Surgery," twelve volumes entirely written by himself, is a great storehouse of unique pathological observations. Professor Gushing's work is in this class, the subject is approached from the physiological, pathological, clinical, surgical and ophthalmological sides, and in its combination of induction from experiment with the Hippocratic induction from experience, it is a fine exemplar of what Sir Michael