In 1850, Curling, an English pathologist, studying the cretinous idiots of Salzburg, written about centuries before by Paracelsus, discovered that with their defective brain and mentality there was associated an absence of the thyroid body, and accompanying symmetrical swellings of fat tissue at the sides of the neck.

Dance like an idiot in the wind!

"I don't want to hear about it," said Oldfield, hurriedly, himself much embarrassed, and inwardly fuming over himself as a colossal idiot for entering upon such a conversation.

A stumpy semi-idiot with shining, oily face and child-staring eyes, who clutched the railing with both big hands and stood comically in huge clothes, his eyes outgazing the judge.

We admit that we have been so thoughtless as to appoint idiots as popes.

More than once straggling soldiers or Indians passed near where we were hidden; but no one thought of searching the thicket for those who were friendly to the garrison, because none save idiots like ourselves would thus have ventured into the lion's mouth.

"Bruce, you're the most senseless idiot on the face of the globe when it comes to climbing mountains!

My theory is that the cripple is equal to the giant, and the idiot to the genius.

There, then, the prisoner found himself, alone, chilled, in this semi-darkness, being able to walk up and down the space of eight square feet like a caged wolf, or to remain seated on his chair like an idiot at Bicêtre.

As in our own history it has been sometimes the fashion for ladies of rank to have dwarves and negroes among their attendants, so it seems to have been the senseless and revolting custom of the Roman ladies of this time to keep idiots among the number of their servants.

Was that divinity which 'tis said protects the drunkard and the idiot about to aid the mad rush of this love-frenzied creature to his long-lost but newly returned dear one?

Now, as I daresay you have discovered, I am rather an idiot than otherwise, and the worst man in the world to carry out anything diplomatically; but my father" He laughed rather ruefully.

The man who would govern a nation by writing its songs was a blethering idiot beside the fellow who can edit its news dispatches.

Gladly would I have expelled all thought of the idiot from my mind, and risen on the morrow, prepared by rest and sweet suspension of mental labour for profitable deliberation.

In his "Unverstand mid schlechte Erziehung," he maintains that Caspar was an idiot until he was brought to Nuremberg, that his mind was then strengthened and developed, and that he was then transformed from an idiot into an impostor.