Some commentators believe that the fish was a pike (RB 457, 1. 3) or a shark, or a whale, or a crocodile, or a hippopotamus. Large specimens of pike may attain a length of nearly 7 feet and a weight of nearly 80 lbs. They are said to attack foxes and small dogs, and snap at the hands and feet of human beings. Some species of sharks enter the mouths of large rivers. The carcharias Gangeticus occurs frequently high up in the large rivers of India; but there are no whales, hippopotami, or crocodiles in the Tigris. According to the Arabian cosmographer Kazwini, who died in 1283, the smell of smoke of a crocodile's liver cures epilepsy, and its dung and gall cure leucoma. Some exegetes think that the fish symbolizes the pagan empire endeavoring to seize what portions it could of the pious Dispersion (Simpson, p. 186).

The Book of Tobit is, of course, not historical. Luther said, If it be fiction, it is a truly beautiful, wholesome, and profitable fiction, the work of a gifted poet. It is a religious novel written by a Persian Jew about 167 B.C. The accounts of the cures of Tobias's blindness and Sara's hysteria are not as accurate as our modern medical reports, but if a contemporary novelist introduced some allusions to the new rejuvenating operation suggested by Dr. Steinach, of Vienna, or the transplantation of the thyroid gland of a monkey for the cure of idiocy, recently performed in Chicago, there would probably be some inaccuracies. We still speak of biliousness, colds in the head or on the lungs; we call conjunctivitis, which is caused by the Morax-Axenfeld bacillus or by the Koch-Weeks microbe, a cold in the eye, and we often read in the daily papers that some man died of acute indigestion.

The author of the Book of Tobit may have heard of a wise man who had cured an attack of hystero-epilepsy by the fumes of the liver of a dolphin, placed on the embers of incense containing asafetida. He may also have known of some cases in which white spots in the eyes had disappeared after the application of charred incense mixed with the gall of a fish or small cetacean. The man

Ligation of deferent canal; cf. Knud Sand, Moderne experimentelle Sexualforschung, besonders die letzten Arbeiten Steinachs ("Verjüngung "), p. 20 (Bonn, 1920).

8 The Baltimore Sun, July 9, 1921 (p. 1, cols. 4, 5) stated that Charles

who performed these wonderful cures would have been regarded as an angel. When St. Paul at Lystra (some eighteen miles southsouthwest of Konia, the ancient Iconium which was the easternmost city of Phrygia) cured a man who had never walked, having been a cripple from his mother's womb, the people said, The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men, and they called Paul: Mercurius, and his companion, Barnabas, Jupiter (Acts 14, 8-12). In cases of hysterical paralysis wonderful cures may be effected even by quacks and charlatans. In hysteria we generally find an increased susceptibility to external suggestion, and the paroxysmal symptoms may be dispelled by suggestion. Hysteria, or neuromimesis, is essentially a lack of inhibitory power, and something particularly nasty or dreaded may induce sufficient inhibitory power. A hysterical fit may be prevented or checked if the patient is threatened with something particularly disagreeable.

One of my medical friends told me that, when he was resident physician at a sanatorium for nervous diseases, he would often tell a nurse who came to him in despair, because one of the female patients had a hysterical fit, Call in another nurse, and tell her to prepare an ice-cold bath; say, If the fit lasts much longer, we must put her in an ice-cold bath and keep her there. This generally resulted in the speedy disappearance of all symptoms. While a patient is unconscious in an epileptic fit, there is no loss of consciousness in a hysterical seizure. Psychotherapeutic measures are more valuable than drugs. Some thirty years ago there was in a wellknown European sanatorium a married woman who was so hysterical that the physician-in-chief finally whipped her. There may have been some sadistic inclination on the part of the doctor, and masochism on the part of the patient. But she was cured. The doctor was sentenced to several months in jail, but there were a number of petitions with a great many signatures, urging the authorities to pardon the energetic healer, or at least permit him to pay a fine. instead of sending him to jail. He paid the fine, and could well afford to do so, because so many husbands sent their hysterical Dice, a former cowboy and house painter, now known as the Miracle Man of York (Pa.), was treating blindness with the tears" of a 66 sea-monster."

wives to his hospital that he had to build two additions. He did not put the liver and the heart of a fish on embers of incense: instead of valerian, which O. W. Holmes called calmer of hysteric squirms, he used ungebrannte Asche, and Asmodeus was with a vengeance sent post to Egypt, there fast bound.

This has about the same meaning as our phrase a rod in a pickle, French une raclée, une volée de coups de bâton. Cf. Grimm's "Wörterbuch," vol. 1, p. 581 (ein Prügel wird volkmässig umschrieben durch ungebrannte Asche) and Sanders, p. 50.

A NEW HOPLOPHONEUS FROM THE TITANOTHERIUM

BEDS.

INVESTIGATION AIDED BY A GRANT FROM THE MARSH FUND OF THE
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES.

BY WILLIAM J. SINCLAIR.

(Read April 22, 1921.)

Comparatively little prospecting was done by the Princeton 1920 expedition to South Dakota in the Titanotherium beds, but as a byproduct of some studies on the contact between this formation and the Oreodon beds the specimen described herewith was found, which is interesting both as the oldest representative of the genus Hoplophoneus and as a higher type of specialization in the development of the chin flange than is found in the various species of this sabertooth from the Oreodon beds. If Hoplophoneus mentalis is ancestral to Eusmilus dakotensis from the Protoceras beds, as seems possible, perhaps we have here an illustration of a case of survival of the fittest adaptation, with dying out of the shorter-chinned mutants of the Oreodon beds, in which less adequate protection was afforded by the chin flange to the long upper saber-teeth.

2/10

FIG. 1. Hoplophoneus mentalis, type specimen, side view of the left half of the lower jaw, two thirds natural size, No. 12515.

HOPLOPHONEUS MENTALIS sp. nov.

Type No. 12515, Princeton University Geological Museum, collecting locality 1015A1, left ramus of the lower jaw with the canine and third and fourth premolars in place (Fig. 1), secured by the 1920 South Dakota, expedition from the uppermost levels of the Titanotherium beds (Chadron formation), two to two and one half feet below the thin local bed of white limestone at the contact between the Chadron and Brule formations (Oreodon beds), and two and a half to three feet above titanothere bones in place, in the valley of Indian Creek, near Taylor's ranch, west of Hart Table in Pennington County (locality shown in Fig. 2 of Plate 1 of the preceding paper, in about the center of the picture).

So far as I am aware, this is the first Hoplophoneus to be described from the Titanotherium beds and is strikingly differentiated from all of the species of the overlying Oreodon beds by the extraordinary depth of the chin (as suggested in the specific name proposed), a character reminiscent of the great development of this structure in Hatcher's Eusmilus dakotcnsis from the Protoceras beds, to which the new form seems to be transitional.

1 Williston's measurements, Kansas Univ. Quarterly, Vol. III., No. 3, p. 72, 1895.

2 Specimens in the Princeton Geological Museum used by G. I. Adams, in defining these species.