828 PETEE BASSOE 



upon, especially by authors of anthropological leanings. Thus, Gilford 

 emphasizes the evidences of senilism as well as the simian characters in 

 acromegaly. He states that not only organs and cells hut the body as a 

 whole is liable to derangement of growth and development. "There is 

 general weakness, the back becomes bowed, the knees bent, the attitude 

 feeble and the gait tottering so that the acromegalic, like the old man, has to 

 depend upon the help of a stick." He points out that some features of 

 senile decay are of a reversionary nature, and of distinctly simian appear- 

 ance, and in acromegaly all of these features occur in an exaggerated de- 

 gree. He applies the general biologic law that late acquired characters are 

 most readily lost; hence the tendency for the reversion of the delicate 

 human hand and foot and the expression-bearing face to a coarser type such 

 as is seen in the anthropoids and in primitive man. 



"Some of these simian features of acromegaly are eminently sugges- 

 tive of a throw-back, if not to an anthropoid, at any rate to a very removed 

 stage of human evolution. The heavy, beetling eyebrows which give such 

 a sinister cast to the countenance of some old men are very distinctly a 

 relic of an older and more brutish stage of evolution." He adds that the 

 primitive paleolithic man must have had a strikingly acromegalic appear- 

 ance on account of his prominent supraorbital ridges, large nose, heavy 

 jaws, and tall, thick-set, clumsy figure. 



Another Englishman who discusses acromegaly from the anthropolo- 

 gist's viewpoint is Arthur Keith. He calls attention to the similarity of the 

 typical acromegalic skull to that of the Neanderthal man, the most ancient 

 type of European yet discovered. 



"In both types the skulls are particularly long and low, the eyebrow 

 ridges are prominent ; the muscular markings are pronounced ; in both, 

 the facial parts of the skull are long and wide." In 1863 T. Huxley called 

 attention to the characteristics of the Neanderthal skull and Barnard Davis 

 then produced an acromegalic skull as proof that a similar formation 

 could be found among modern men. In 1872 W. A. Ereund of Berlin 

 described a case of acromegaly under the name of "macrosomia partialis" 

 and called attention to the resemblance of the skull to that of the gorilla 

 and chimpanzee. D. J. Cunningham in 1878 was the first Englishman to 

 describe fully a case of acromegaly and also the first to call attention to 

 the relationship between what is now known as acromegaly and gigantism. 

 He, too, commented on the anthropoid nature of the cranial characters.^ 

 These -early authors who were under the influence of Darwin looked upon 

 acromegaly as an instance of atavism, a theory which was discarded as 

 obsolete when the dependence of acromegaly upon hypophyseal disease 

 was demonstrated. 



Keith assumes that the anterior lobe of the hypophysis produces a hor- 

 mone which "renders the osteoblasts hypersensitive to the various stresses 

 which fall on the human skeleton during life. Thus, the osteoblasts at the 



