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rooms, thousands of skulls are arranged on shelves
like specimens in a museum. Some of them reveal
sword cuts and bullet holes that the spiders have
vainly tried for fifty years to heal.

At Novara the pyramidal pile of skulls, which in
1890 (when my wife and I visited the place) stood on
the edge of the wheatfield where the battle was
mainly fought, had been removed nearer to the city,
on the street down which the soldiers of the un-
fortunate Charles Albert were pursued by the
Austrians, who forced him to abdicate the throne to his
son, Victor Emmanuel. The gruesome relics are now
placed in rows on the sides of a deep pit, the skeleton
of a tall grenadier standing upright in the midst.

Novara

We next broke our journey at Aosta that I might
again study the crétins (cretins), a type of idiot found
in different Alpine regions, in Frohnleiten in Styria,
and in parts of Valais, but most numerous at Aosta,
"famous for its mountains and infamous for its
idiots." Here startling results had been produced by
the preservation and selective breeding of paupers.
This peculiar type of idiocy has existed for a long
time, and its original cause is not yet fully known.
Always associated with goiter, a swelling of de-
generated thyroid glands -- in cause also uncer-
tain -- it is usually thought to be due to absence of
iodine in water, but this I believe not yet proved.
The tendency to develop goiter seems to be hered-
itary. Nearly all children attacked by it become
idiots; adults who acquire it may not be mentally
affected.

Selective
breeding
of cretins

In 1897 I wrote certain paragraphs which follow,
interesting perhaps for the very fact that former
conditions no longer prevail, as will shortly appear:

-313-

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: The Days of a Man: Being Memories of a Naturalist, Teacher, and Minor Prophet of Democracy. Volume: 2. Contributors: David Starr Jordan - author. Publisher: World Book. Place of Publication: Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY. Publication Year: 1922. Page Number: 313.
    
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