in which to try this treatment, medical literature from all parts of the United States has been filled with reports of authenticated cases. Among these are scions of families which have been American for more than three generations and which may, therefore, be considered as products of an American environment. The same condition of things has occurred in both Great Britain and on the European continent in districts which, prior to 1890, were supposed to be free from cretinism. This illustrates the results of stimulus given investigation in biology rather than increase of the disorder. The influence of spoiled maize in producing the mixed skin, nervous and mental disorder known as pellagra in the Italians, would seem, from the results of the researches of Billod,[178] to be chiefly due to the conjoined effects of unhygienic surroundings, the offspring of climate and soil. The fungus on maize (ustilago), like the fungus on rye (ergot), produces rather long-lasting neurosis of an epileptic character, susceptible to transmission to the offspring of women poisoned by these fungi. The Italian disease, pellagra, manifests the features one would expect from an improper food taken under unhygienic conditions. While this is undoubtedly exaggerated by the habits of the peasantry in Italy, still in a lesser degree like effects of food are observable in other races. The influence of the potato diet in degenerating the Irish Celt in comparison with the Scottish Celt under the same conditions, is difficult at present to determine for lack of data. Certainly the descendants of this class of Irish Celts rapidly regain a handsome, healthy status under mixed American diet, even though the hygienic surroundings in the great cities be not the best. He who has to treat a class of neurasthenics in whom starch digestion is impaired finds that a diet of potatoes (undoubtedly through the auto-intoxication it produces) will increase certain nervous symptoms, and hence the tendency to transmission to the next generation.