Parents suffering from diseases in which the thyroid has degenerated, such as chronic tuberculosis, malaria, syphilis, and other cachectic diseases, have children whose growth is slow, and who remain backward physically and mentally. Such children easily acquire any infectious disease. Tuberculosis, as we have shown at the International Congress on Tuberculosis in Paris, in 1905, is remarkably frequent among them. We can easily appreciate the fact, if we realize that the children of such parents in whom the thyroid has degenerated through disease are born usually with a congenital atrophy of the thyroid gland, which has been proved by Gamier and Perrando. These children have inherited from their forefathers the bad qualities of their thyroid, and this will also explain why such children, when fully grown up, will not remain, as a rule, for so long a time as youthful looking as other persons who have inherited healthy thyroids; they early become aged-looking and, also, as a rule, their lives are shortened owing to their tendency to contract easily all kinds of infections. Evidence founded on experiments is at our disposal to prove our assertion that irregularities of the thyroid are inherited by offspring. Professor Lanz,[114] of Amsterdam, formerly an assistant of Professor Kocher in Bern, has extirpated the thyroid gland of goats, and he found that in each case the young of such animals, as compared with normal kids of the same age, remained backward in growth. There can thus be no doubt that the qualities of the ductless glands of the parents are inherited by their descendants. Footnote 114: Beiträge zur klin. Chirurgie, xiv., p. 1, 1905. We often find diseases of the various ductless glands present among members of the same families. We can trace, not infrequently, diabetes, Graves’s disease, etc., and acromegaly, occurring in different members of the same family, and this will be observed most often in the case of diabetes and Graves’s disease. Thus I have observed in the case of two fathers (coming from the same city in Hungary, but belonging to different nationalities) diabetes, and their daughters had protuberant eyes; they had a small goiter, and the typical fingers characteristic of Graves’s disease, emaciated and pointed like those of the Madonna of Perugino, which have been mentioned already by other authors as symptoms of Graves’s disease. There was no tachycardia as yet in either of these two cases which had Graves’s disease. Very probably any mental shock, as in so many other cases, would here have caused sudden development into Graves’s disease.