tism is the acromegaly of subjects with unossified epiphysheal cartilages, whatever their age may be." In giants we find many of the osseous phenomena of acromegaly, such as prognathism, large sinuses, thick skulls, and enlarged and usually eroded sellae. Giants and acromegalics show the same tendencies to lethargy, to slow cerebration, to physical weakness and exhaustion, and to sexual impotency. Other physico-chemical combinations of the pituitary are also disturbed, and the life phenomena of acromegalics and giants bear a striking resemblance to each other.

An interesting contrast is revealed by the results of hypopituitarism effective during the growth period. Certain cases of infantilism are quite likely the result of pituitary deficiency. These are "the adults in small mould," the true microcosmic dwarfs, the antitheses of the giants. I have had an infantile under observation whose cella turcica measured 7x9 mm. Her hands and features were delicately chiseled and although a woman of thirty-two the expression was girlish and the body was that of a maiden passing into womanhood. Another form of hypopituitarism has attracted much attention since its description by Frohlich in 1902. It is characterized by obesity, hypotrichosis, and retarded development of or absence of the secondary sexual characteristics. Frohlich named this condition distrophia adiposo-genitalis. Its counterpart with all the salient features has been produced experimentally in dogs by hypophysectomy. Sufficient post mortem observations definitely associate that condition with a destructive lesion of the hypophysis. A most interesting combination is the association of this pituitary defect with absence, or marked diminution, of the stroma cells of the testicles and ovaries, to which cells is attributed the somatogenic phase of the sexual impulse. Thus in addition to modifying the growth of the individual we find the hypopysis reaching out to prevent the reproduction of individuals in whom its functionings are abnor

Through its correlations with the testicles and ovaries, and possibly with other organs, it creates impotency and dulls sexual desire, a beautiful phylogenetic protective mechanism.

Inasmuch as morality in the common mind has not yet been divorced from sexuality, the above relationship as an instructive corollary for the moralists, to wit: The conception of morality in some instances as a phase of disease. It should be unnecessary to state the converse.

THE THYROID-CRETINISM.

The association of cretinism and thyroid disease has long been appreciated in regions in which goitre is endemic. It has been noted that wherever goitre is prevalent cretinism is common. It is stated that there are 15,000 cretins in Switzerland alone "the outcome of a host of researches has been the recognition of the enormous this gland, which is essential for the norimportance of the internal secretions of mal growth of the body in childhood and for the maintenance of the proper meta bolism of the epidermic tissues and of the brain" (Osler). The thyroid early received much attention in the study of growth anomalies and its relationship to disturbance in growth is quite well known. In cretins the gland is found to be markedly atrophic and the colloid thickened. In many instances the gland is fibrous. Goitre is present in 63 per cent of cases (Vogt). The histo-pathology of the thyroid in these cases points to a hypofunction which results in a peculiar type of dwarfism which varies from the types associated with pituitary and thymic insufficiencies. One of the most striking features of cretinism is a disturbance of growth which effects chiefly the cutaneous and osseous systems. There is arrested or retarded bony development. The skull is small, the base is materially shortened (Virchow), the forehead is low, prognathism is marked, and the nose is retrousse. The pelvis is often small and irregularly shaped. The stature averages from 1 to 1.5 m. The appearance is quite characteristic and the typical case is easily recognized by any one who has studied photographs. photographs. The heavy coarse skinned face, the thick-lipped drooling mouth, the imbecile expression and the pudgy figures all contribute to make a picture which is easy of recognition. The hair is coarse and short. In males the beard is thin or absent. The secondary sex-characteristics are not developed. The pubic and axillary hair is absent, the penis and testicles are small. The uterus and ovaries and external genitalia are infantile, and in both sexes the organs are ill fitted for procreation. The sexual instinct is absent or weak. Often there is little sign of maturity before the fifth or sixth decades.

We again see the race protected by a chemical correlation. The subjects of thyroid insufficiency are illy adapted to the struggle for existence and are unable to contribute to race progress. They are retrogressive types. An irresistible hidden force, stronger than hunan made laws,

foodstuffs, especially fat, to the maturing spermatozoa. Regaud, Policard and Loisel first regarded them as forming an interstitial gland with an internal secretion. Much experimental and clinical evidence has accumulated to support their view.

Roentgenization destroys the germinal cells and leaves the interstitial. Potentia generandi disappears, potentia coeundi remains normal. Growth, and secondary sex manifestions and characteristics are not efSterilization of women, without fected. the unpleasant symptoms which follow castration, has recently been accomplished on therapeutic grounds by roentgenization. Spermatogenesis does not take place in cryptorchids although the development and sex characteristics are normal. The results of vasectomy is to destroy the tubules, the stroma remains intact.

Steinach has shown in his ovarian and

testicular transplants that he can at will testicular transplants that he can at will change the sex characteristics, with the corresponding growth phenomena, in guinea pigs and rabbits. Microscopic examination of the transplants shows that the germinal cells have disappeared and the interstitial cells remain.

The maximum amount of stroma is observed in animals at the breeding season. Tandler observed that in moles in December almost no stroma was present while in June it constituted the major part of the testicle.

It is evident from the above that the way the germinal glands influence growth and metabolism is by the powerful influence which their hormones exert on the soma. As Tandler so well puts it: "The hormonic collaboration of these organs (germ glands, thyroid, thymus, and hypophysis) times the normal entering into maturity of the individual. This is characterized by the completion of growth, the establishment of sexual potency and the appearance of the secondary sexual characteristics."

The purpose of this paper has been to to give a rough sketch of the hormonic correlation of certain ductless glands as manifested in growth phenomena. In our practice we are often seeing abnormally developing children and abnormally developed adults who come to us for explanation and help. Of help there is some, of explanation there should be much. Study of the problem is sure to bring much of economic, social and therapeutic value to medicine.

808 Brandies Theatre.

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JOSEPH SMITH, THE MORMON PROPHET; A STUDY OF A RELIGIOUS PSYCHOPATH.

B. F. GILLMOR, M. D.

Continued from page 156.)

When, therefore, the young Joseph embarked upon his strange career, he found the readiest acceptance within his own family and the very first, and always the most devoted, of his converts were his own parents, brothers and sisters. His family heard his revelations and "received them with joy." Members of his family expressed their entire belief in him and after his first visions are confirmed in the opinion that God was about to bring to light something upon which we could stay our minds, or that would give us a more perfect knowledge of the plan of salvation and the redemption of the human. This caused us greatly to rejoice, the sweetest union of happiness pervaded our house, and tranquility reigned in our midst.”

After reading of these great expectations, one can hardly repress a smile upon reading the plan of salvation as revealed in the Book of Mormon, like the mountain that brought forth a mouse!

Later on, we find the family in terror over the operations of a conjurer who has been imported to discover the location of Joe Smith's gold bible." Several pages of circumstantial description of his operations are given in Lucy's book and one gains a lively impression of the excitement, terror and hope that pervaded the home.

His dying brother Alvin, in the pitiful scene of his death given in the family history, abjures Joseph to be faithful to the instructions of the Lord and to "get the record." Here we find, also, the unquestioning faith with which Joseph's brothers accept his visions and the entire self-devotion with which they take upon themselves the priestly missions to which Joseph ordains them.

When a portion of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon is indulgently given into the hands of Martin Harris, a prosperous farmer who paid for the publication of the book and who is saturated with the supernaturalism that pervades the neighborhood, and is lost from his house, 'sobs and groans and the most bitter lamentations" fill the Smith household, for it appeared "that all which we had so fondly anticipated and which had been the source of so much secret gratification had in a monent fled and fled forever."

We find within his family and among such of his acquaintances as Martin Harris. the Whitmer family and Oliver Cowdrey,

who became his "scribe," the ready credulity and sustaining encouragement that furnishes so great a support and aids so effectually in the growth of such a career as Joseph Smith's. Incident after incident might be mentioned to heighten the picture of his surroundings. He breathed an air saturated with the superstitions of debased forms of Christianity, pervaded with beliefs in signs, wonders and heavenly testimonials and peopled with spirits, angels and devils. And, in addition to this, he came into the world with an unsound physical inheritance; with the abnormal nervous and mental organization that was to react so brilliantly to the unconscious experimentation to which he was to subject it, a sort of experimentation that chance only placed in his way and that became, as we shall see, a form of emotional Onanism as destructive of soundness as the true form of that vice is reputed to be.

Among the earlier incidents of significance in the personal history of the prophet is that relating to the unearthing, in Sep tember, 1819, of "a curious stone found in the digging of a well upon the premises of Mr. Clark Chase, near Palmyra. This stone attracted particular notice on account of its peculiar shape, resembling that of a child's foot. It was of a whitish, glassy appearance, though opaque, resembling quartz.

Joseph Smith, Sr., and his sons, Alvin and Hyrum, did the chief labor of this well digging, and Joseph, Jr., . . . manifested a special fancy for this geological curiosity and carried it home with him. . . . Very soon the pretension transpired that he could see wonderful things by its aid." I have been quoting from P. Tucker, who was "editor and proprietor" of the "Wayne Sentinel" and "was editorially connected with that paper at the printing by his press of the original edition of the Book of Mormon, in 1830.”

At the time of the finding of this odd stone, the young Joseph was but 14 years of age and was still somewhat debilitated from a severe illness that had been followed by the necrosis, or decay, of a bone in his leg. Rather a severe operation had been performed upon the bone, and this being before the days of anesthetics, was no doubt attended with severe shock to his neurotic and already supersensitive nervous He still limped from the effects of

this disease.

A year or two after this, this abnormal child's condition is described in the following words-words eloquent to any physician who has given time to the study of mental

and nervous diseases: "My husband, Alvin and Joseph were reaping together in the field, and as they were reaping, Joseph stopped quite suddenly and seemed to be in a very deep study. Alvin, observing it, hurried him, saying 'We must not slacken. our hands or we will not be able to complete our task.' Upon this, Joseph went to work again, and, after laboring a short time, he stopped just as he had done before. It attracted the attention of his father, upon which he discovered that Joseph was very pale. My husband, supposing that he was sick, told him to go to the house and have his mother doctor him. He accordingly ceased his work and started, but on coming to a beautiful green under an apple tree, he stopped and lay down, for he was so weak he could proceed no further. He was here but a short time, when the messenger he saw the previous night visited him again."

But to return to the stone with which the young Joseph is seeing things: "The most glittering sights revealed to the mortal vision of the young impostor, in the manner stated, were hidden treasures of great value, including enormous deposits of gold and silver sealed in earthen pots or iron chests, and buried in the earth in the immediate vicinity of the place where he stood. These discoveries finally became too dazzling for his eyes in daylight, and he had to shade. his vision by looking in his hat! The imposture was renewed and repeated at frequent intervals from 1820 to 1827, various localities being the scenes of . . delusive search for money. . as pointed out by the revelations of the magic stone. Numerous traces of excavations left by Smith are yet remaining as evidences of his impostures.'

Tucker has spoken with bitterness, hatred and contempt, for he has failed utterly to comprehend the nature of the phenomena upon which he as commented. The ordinary man can appreciate the sensations of physical sickness and suffering, his own experience gives him a competent basis for sympathy, but never having suffered the sensations of mental or nervous ills, an exhibition of the phenomena of these departures from health fill him either with irrational resentment and brutality or an equally irrational wonder and veneration. For centuries, insanity was looked upon as a manifestation of divinity, and for other centuries as a demoniacal possession. In the past, thousands of these poor sick ones have been abused and beaten, hounded and burned as witches or chained and starved in loathsome bedlams. Even to this present day, scores of the borderland cases,

the less sick, the neurotic and mentally imbalanced, have lived and died in a world that did not comprehend them. Where circumstances and capacity have combined to elevate such individuals to positions of importance, as frequently happens, they have been given either unlimited love or unlimited hatred, have been either reviled or glorified. Only the neurologist or the student of psychiatry has understood them. It is true that a large part of the world's work has been done by individuals who have wandered in the borderland of insanity. The world is under a great debt of gratitude to the individuals of this class, who alone have undertaken tasks that have required for their doing the pertinacity and obstinacy of an obscession.

The glorious John Browns of history, the Paganninis and Schopehauers, the Jeremiahs and Joseph Smiths have sometimes first set erratic feet upon the pathways that are to be followed by the race. But although we have derived from such as these much good to be grateful for, we have a tenfold meed of evil to lay at their cursed doors!

All of the lower types of religion are centered and pivoted about some form of emotionalism. From this the undeveloped mind receives its stimulus and the theological scheme supplies the satisfying sense of finality. A large proportion of the vagaries of religion are comprehensible to one who keeps in mind the ever-present necessity under which religions develop, the necessity of supplying an attractive emotionalism. One may even understand why so terrible a thing as homicide has been utilized as the pivot and center of crude religious systems.

A tickle is but a transformed reflex of protection. The throat, the flanks and other vulnerable parts are protected against the grasp of an enemy by an automatic reaction quicker than thought. This irrita bility, when stimulated lightly by a playful and not a deadly grasp, induces a pleasurable sensation.

There are certain mental reflexes that undergo analogous transformations. Among emotional instincts that the necessities of gregareous life have produced is the aversion the normal man feels to the taking of human life needlessly and without provocation and passion. The quick taking of life in the height of passion, he finds palliation for, but slow and calculating killing revolts his very nature. Violate this communal instinct and quiet his resentment by inculcation a belief in the religious necessity of cold murder and his mental reflex is trans

formed into wild and chaotic excitement and supplies, a stimulating emotionalism that constitutes the principal attraction of many savage religious. have

Unnumbered homicidal maniacs served as prophets in the unwritten centuries of barbarism; but no less destructive of life and enlightenment, although in an indirect manner, have been the milder types of lunatics who infest the pages of religious history.

It is only where the standard of education is high that the individual is capable of distinguishing between the intellectually sound and the unsound; and even among the cultured the cloyed appetites of the merely aesthetic run to Paul Verlains, to Oscar Wildes, and to the silken and transparent horrors that fill playhouses and everywhere debase art, which, like religion, often rests upon a foundation of varying emotionalism.

If a man froths at the mouth, strangles his own child, or learnedly declares that clouds are made of Triassic chalk, he is generally pronounced insane; but the borderland wanderer whose dangerous intellect may be both brilliant and unsound is either taken at his own over-distended valuation of himself or is hated with an unreasoning hatred.

If the average person is warned at all against such an individual, it is by an unreliable instinct or intuition rather than by reason. When he does not accept such an individual, he rejects him with a sort of helpless rage. He has no standards by which to measure him, is without capacity to appraise him and can only combat him with the elemental forces of hatred, vituperation or physical abuse. It is not surprising, therefore, that Joseph Smith's contemporaries should fail to see the significance of his "stone gazing" and its improved successor, the use of the Urim and Thummim," under the influence of which he received his "revelations," and that they should combat him, later, with blind hatred and unpitying brutality.

In order to understand the results of the young Joseph's experiments upon himself and the character of the psychical phenomena induced by his "stone gazing" it will be necessary to turn to the experiments of Mesmer, James Braid, etc. For the induction of the variable states grouped under the names Mesmerism, Braidism, hypnotism, animal magnetism or odylic force, all experimenters made use of bright objects upon which the subject fixes his gaze. Luys used revolving mirrors; Mesmer a combination of mirrors, dim lights, soft music,