ISO THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 acrome- 

 galics 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 Frohlich 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 Hutchin- 

 son.^2 Even in folk-lore, obesity always connotes sexual frigidity.^^ In 

 a recent view of Dr. Leonard Guthrie, the autopsy of the great Napo- 

 leon 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 Eussian Campaign, may have been due to the onset 

 of a pituitary obesity, the dystrophia adiposo-genitalis of Mohr and 

 Frohlich.^* The logical opposite of the acromegalics are therefore, not 

 the fat patients of the Mohr-Prohlich type, but the short, swarthy, goat- 

 legged achondroplasics who often exhibit great muscular strength, un- 

 usual sexual precocity and general salacity. These have been assimi- 

 lated to the satyrs of mythology to the short, swarthy, troglodyte peo- 

 ples 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 fits, is short, swarthy, muscular ; the frigid 

 type, of high pituitary index, is either flabby and obese (the Mlhle 

 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 Cgesarean section three or four times run- 



32 See, Univ\ Med. JRecord, London, 1912, I., 119-121. 



33 ' ' Ein putar Hahn xvird pelten fett, ' ' etc. 



34 F. Guthrie, Proc. XVII. Internat. Cong. Med., 1913; London, 1914, Sect. 

 XXIII., 143-154. 



35 Univ. Med. Becord, London, 1912, I., 121. 



