ild, and whose head was scarcely as large as a man's
fist. Magitot reported a case of a microcephalic woman of thirty who
weighed 70 pounds.

Hippocrates and Strabonius both speak of head-binding as a custom
inducing artificial microcephaly, and some tribes of North American
Indians still retain this custom.

As a rule, microcephaly is attended with associate idiocy and arrested
development of the rest of the body. Ossification of the fontanelles in
a mature infant would necessarily prevent full development of the
brain. Osiander and others have noticed this anomaly. There are cases
on record in which the fontanelles have remained open until adulthood.

Augmentation of the volume of the head is called macrocephaly, and
there are a number of curious examples related. Benvenuti describes an
individual, otherwise well formed, whose head began to enlarge at
seven. At twenty-seven it measured over 37 inches in circumference and
the man's face was 15 inches in height; no other portion of his body
increased abnormally; his voice was normal and he was very intelligent.
He died of apoplexy at the age of thirty.

Fournier speaks of a cranium in the cabinet of the Natural History
Museum of Marseilles of a man by the name of Borghini, who died in
1616. At the time he was described he was fifty years old, four feet in
height; his head measured three feet in circumference and one foot in
height. There was a proverb in Marseilles, "Apas mai de sen que
Borghini," meaning in the local dialect, "Thou hast no more wit than
Borghini." This man, whose fame became known all over France, was not
able, as he grew older, to maintain the weight of his head, but carried
a cushion on each shoulder to prop it up. Fournier also quotes the
history of a man who died in the same city in 1807 at the age of
sixty-seven. His head was enormous, and he never lay on a bed for
thirty years, passing his nights in a chair, generally reading or
writing. He only ate once in twenty-four or thirty hours, never warmed
himself, and never used warm water. His knowledge was said to have been
great and encyclopedic, and he pretended never to have heard the
proverb of Borghini. There is related the account of a Moor, who was
seen in Tunis early in this century, thirty-one years of age, of middle
height, with a head so prodigious in dimensions that crowds flocked
after him in the streets. His nose was quite long, and his mouth so
large that he could eat a melon as oth