his requirement being one a day.  He sees them go day by day.  Finally they are all gone.  He feels his faculties slipping hour by hour.  Shall he tell her?  Indecision grips him, and he delays until the day when his consciousness sinks to the point where his mind no longer grasps his problem.  The wife must endure the spectacle of the enchantment of her husband, and his change from gallant lover to dull animal ogre.  A new version of Beauty and the Beast!

Cretinism as one manifestation of a soul without thyroid or without enough thyroid is not all.  The first great successes with thyroid were achieved in adults, particularly adult women, exhibiting a peculiar obesity, coldness, loss of hair and teeth and a remarkable lassitude and torpor that might be summed up as a chronic drowsiness, like a saturation of the blood with some narcotic drug.  Or there may be a melancholia, or a lack of ability to seize the finer points of a mental process, or an argument treated in the abstract.  Children are said to be lazy, slow or dull.  They experience an irritating difficulty in understanding questions and expressing their wants and desires, and so are declared to be vicious, or stupid.

All these are grades of the degeneration which Ord, the Englishman, named myxedema.  At its worst it is a sort of bloating and drying of the body and the mind.  Then there is infantilism, which is helped by the giving of thyroid extract.  It differs from the ordinary cretinism in that, while one is reminded of the latter by the physical stunting and the other stigmata, there is a certain amount of intelligence which enables the individual to hold his own while he is a child.  He becomes a grown-up baby:  at twenty prefers the company of children of ten, and passes under the evil influence of designing so-called normal persons.  So dominated he will lie, steal, start fires, commit almost any crime, with no inherent flair for criminality, but because of a lack of independent judgment and inability to resist suggestion, and a desire to please friends.  He is simply an overgrown child who still loves to play with toys, laughs and cries, becomes angry or afraid, unreasonably and ridiculously, and yells for mamma when thwarted or scared.

So much for what happens when there is not sufficient of the thyroid secretion in the blood and tissues.  Now to consider the effects of an excess of it, the condition called hyperthyroidism, as the insufficiency of it is labelled subthyroidism.  Too much thyroxin can be introduced into the system of a normal individual, or even a cretin by the simple administration of too large doses or over too long a time.  Also a train of symptoms similar to those evoked by an oversecretion of the thyroid may be mobilized by the taking of too much iodine.  Great sorrow, great joy, a sudden severe jolt to the nervous equilibrium, sexual excitement, an overwhelming anger or grief may leave in their wake a permanent hyperthyroidism.  The symptoms