The size and shape and general configuration of the hands, fingers and toes are details that tell an endocrine tale.  Students of hands naturally have grouped them as the long slender and the short, broad, the bony and the well-filled out, the tapering fingers and the stumpy.  The character of a hand is determined anatomically by the length and breadth of the bones, the amount and distribution of fat, and the thickness and elasticity of the skin.  Over these, the essential control lies in the pituitary and the thyroid.  So we find that pituitary types have, when there is oversecretion, large bony, gross hands, spade-shaped, or when there is undersecretion, hands that are plump, with peculiarly tapering fleshy fingers.  The hyperthyroid has long slender fingers, the subthyroid pudgy, coarse, ugly foreshortened hands, often cold, and bluish.

FACIAL TYPES

An artist will see in a face the past history of generations, a narrative of the adventures of the blood, a record of tears and smiles, wrinkles and dimples, the victories and defeats of buried drudgery and romance.  These signatures which the Faculty of Life have scribbled or engraved over it as upon a diploma, bespeak for him spiritual moments.  To the student of the internal secretions the lines, expressions, attitudes are important for they tell of the state of tensions and strains in the vegetative apparatus with which they are inseparably connected.  It is when one comes to the consideration of the face as a complex of brows, eyes, nose, lips and jaws that he becomes most interested.  For in the modeling and tone of every one of the features each of the endocrine glands has something to say.  In consequence there has been described the hyperpituitary face, and the hyperthyroid face, the subthyroid face and the subpituitary face, the adrenal face, the eunuchoid face and the ovarian face and also the thymic.

To bring to mind an immediate complete image of the hyperthyroid face, one should think of Shelley.  The oval shape of it, with the delicate modeling of all the features, the wide, high brow, the large, vivacious, prominent eyes with the glint of a divine fire in them and the sensitive lips all belong to the classical picture.  Generally flushed over the cheek-bones, there is undoubtedly a certain effeminate effect associated with it.  At least, it is the least animal and brutish of the faces of man.

On the other hand, the subthyroid face is that of the cretin and cretinoid idiot, in a mild degree.  So characteristic that we recognize the portrait in the descriptions of Pliny in early Roman tunes and of Marco Polo in his Asiatic travels.  Coarseness, dullness, pudginess are its keynotes.  Irregular features, tendency to wide separation of the eyes and pug nose, sallow, puffy complexion, waxy thickened nose and eyelids, deep-set, listless, lacklustre eyebrows, and thick prominent lips comprise the catalogue of the physiognomy.  On the whole, the sort of face one passes in the street as stupid and common.  But there are a number of fascinating and marvelous varieties of the stupid and common.