In a few days the cretin will get warmer, and require much less wrapping and bed-clothing.  With the improvement in circulation, the color becomes better and the extremities lose their coldness.  In a week or so, irritability and resentment at disturbance appear.  He will begin to recognize and know his parents, smile and play.  There is a gradual return to the normal of the facial appearance, and a resumption of growth.  All kinds of marvelous growth effects occur.  Twenty teeth may be cut in six months.  Coarse, rough dry, shaggy hair becomes fine, silken, long and curly.  The skin becomes soft, moist and roseate.  Inches in height may be added every month.  Bright, active, even talkative, are the descriptive terms an observer would apply after a few months.  A complete remaking of body and soul is apparently affected.

Yet, should the administration of the thyroid cease, an almost immediate reversion to the original vegetative condition is inevitable.  After a few days, reactiveness slows down, the child will speak only when spoken to, will sit quietly in a chair all day and act semi-anesthetized.  Gradually hair and skin return to the previous cold-blooded animal state, and the whole picture of the cretin is in full bloom.  Supplying the internal secretion of the gland promptly repeats the transformation.

One wonders what is to be the ultimate fate of these reformed cretins.  Since the tale of the opening of life to them, once considered hopeless idiots, is scarce a generation old, we have no data, as yet, as to the character of their children or grandchildren, their adventures and vicissitudes, in short, their life history.  Those of whom we have any record are normal and healthy school children or workers, alive to the interests of childhood or their occupation and social circles.  No one outside their family knows that they are cretins, and the most acute observer would be hard put to it to suspect.  What a theme for the reflections upon appearances the eminent Victorians loved!

There are possibilities the imagination may envisage.  One may suppose such a cretin, with all his other ductless glands intact, grown successfully to manhood under careful medical guidance.  No one but himself is aware of his affliction, outside of his medical advisers.  Luck aids him to rise in the world, or perhaps he has been born with a spoon of the precious metals in his mouth.  Adolescence, love and marriage dance their sequence.  Our hero of course keeps his dread secret to himself.  Whether such an omission of confidence would entitle his wife to a divorce is something courts will be called upon to decide sooner or later.  But, without anticipating, the honeymoon involves a trip to the South Seas.  A storm and a wreck throws them alone on an island, tropical, easy to live on, and rescue in the course of a few months certain.  The man, to his horror, discovers that he has saved of his medicaments only a pill box containing half a dozen of thyroid tablets,