Even character and appearance may be inherited by offspring. The height of parents is, as a rule, though not in every case, inherited by their children, as also are many features of their external appearance. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the size of an individual and his outward appearance are dependent on the internal secretions of the ductless glands; and as these qualities are inherited, so we may presume that the properties of the ductless glands, which produce these effects, may also be inherited; and that this is not a vague supposition is demonstrated, we think, in a paper we read on the subject of heredity at the German Congress of Internal Medicine at Leipzig, in 1907, in which we showed that the alterations of the ductless glands are inherited with remarkable frequency. Thus Graves’s disease can frequently be inherited, and the children descended from such parents, especially after puberty, often have a small goiter. In such cases a slight protuberance of the eyes can also be noticed; they are frequently very nervous, and any sudden shock will be sufficient to induce a typical case of Graves’s disease. Oesterreicher[112] found 9 cases of exophthalmic goiter in one family. The frequent instances of heredity in Graves’s disease are insisted upon by Brouwer[113] and other authors. Footnote 112: Quoted after Moebius, “Die Basedow’sche Krankheit,” second edition, 1906. Footnote 113: Quoted after Oppenheim, “Lehrbuch des Nervenkrankheiten,” Berlin, 1906. Degenerative changes of the pituitary body may also be inherited. Thus Bonardi and Schwoner and others also showed cases of acromegaly of hereditary origin. Diabetes is, as we have said, a disease of the ductless glands, and we have especially emphasized, on previous occasions, how frequently, if not invariably, diabetes originates through heredity. We have also shown in a communication published in the _Practitioner_, of London, in October, 1903, that the children of diabetic persons have an inherited tendency to alimentary glycosuria, which occurs very frequently among them. Myxœdematous persons, as a rule, have children displaying symptoms of congenital myxœdema, and cretins have cretinous children. The very interesting case has been published of a woman who, until the age of 40, had two normal children. She then acquired a goiter, and the child that was born later was a cretin with a goiter (Lanz).