In his excellent work on heredity, Dejerine1 pointed out the fact that exophthalmic goiter occurs in neuropathic families. He looks on exophthalmic goiter as a form of an hereditary neurosis. Long before Dejerine, Rendu2 wrote that persons with this disease had among their ancestors, aliens, epileptics and general paretics. Rendu claimed that there must be a certain relation among all these diseases. Since then Gauthier3 has shown the important rôle played by the thyroid gland in Basedow's disease. Several writers on the subject have attempted to show that there is a direct heredity in exophthalmic goiter. Pende4 states that primary exophthalmic goiter is always associated with a constitutional hereditary state of irritability and instability of the thyroid, or the regulating nervous system of the thyroid secretion. Pende bases his statements particularly on the reported cases of hereditary exophthalmic goiter. It must, however, be admitted that a