oval elements or in their mingling, or to some disturbance in their early development.  But the same may doubtless be said of the normal dissimilarities between brothers and sisters.  It is quite true that any of these aberrations may be due to antenatal disease, but to call them abnormal does not beg that question.  If it is thought that any authority is needed to support this view, we can scarcely find a weightier than that of Virchow, who repeatedly insisted on the right use of the word “anomaly,” and who taught that, though an anomaly may constitute a predisposition to disease, the study of anomalies—­pathology, as he called it, teratology as we may perhaps prefer to call it—­is not the study of disease, which he termed nosology; the study of the abnormal is perfectly distinct from the study of the morbid.  Virchow considers that the region of the abnormal is the region of pathology, and that the study of disease must be regarded distinctly as nosology.  Whether we adopt this terminology, or whether we consider the study of the abnormal as part of teratology, is a secondary matter, not affecting the right understanding of the term “anomaly” and its due differentiation from the term “disease.”

At the Innsbruck meeting of the German Anthropological Society, in 1894, Virchow thus expressed himself:  “In old days an anomaly was called pathos, and in this sense every departure from the norm is for me a pathological event.  If we have ascertained such a pathological event, we are further led to investigate what pathos was the special cause of it....  This cause may be, for example, an external force, or a chemical substance, or a physical agent, producing in the normal condition of the body a change, an anomaly pathos.  This can become hereditary under some circumstances, and then become the foundation for certain small hereditary characters which are propagated in a family; in themselves they belong to pathology, even although they produce no injury.  For I must remark that pathological does not mean harmful; it does not indicate disease; disease in Greek is nosos, and it is nosology that is concerned with disease.  The pathological under some circumstances can be advantageous” (Correspondenz-blatt Deutsch Gesellschaft fuer Anthropologie, 1894).  These remarks are of interest when we are attempting to find the wider bearings of such an anomaly as sexual inversion.

This same distinction has more recently been emphasized by Professor Aschoff (Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift, February 3, 1910; of. British Medical Journal, April 9, 1910, p. 892), as against Ribbert and others who would unduly narrow the conception of pathos.  Aschoff points out that, not merely for the sake of precision and uniformity of terminology but of clear thinking, it is desirable that we should retain a distinction in regard to which Galen and the ancient physicians were very definite.  They used pathos as the