CHAPTER I

THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY

A STUDY OF THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION IN RELATION TO THE TYPES

OF HUMAN NATURE

BY LOUIS BERMAN, M.D.

ASSOCIATE IN BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

1922

The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.

--Francis Bacon, _Novum Organum_, 1620.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE

I. HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE DISCOVERED

II. THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY

III. THE ADRENAL GLANDS, GONADS, AND THYMUS

IV. THE GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE

V. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE NORMAL BODY

VI. THE MECHANICS OF THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE

VII. THE RHYTHMS OF SEX

VIII. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND

IX. THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY

X. THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY

XI. SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES

XII. APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

XIII. THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION

THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY

INTRODUCTION

ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE

THE CASE AGAINST HUMAN NATURE

Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce has

taken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species.

In the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature of

the queer beings about him. As he grows, the research continues,

amplifies, broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracy

of the data he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature,

consciously cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature--every

man feels himself entitled to that degree from the university

of disillusioning experience. In defense of his claim, only the

limitations of his articulate faculty will curb the vehemence of his

indictment of his fellows.

For all history provides the material, literature the critique,

biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The

historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection

of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time

and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have

been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have

been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has

remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for

the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.

The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,

structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that

individuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom,

law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of

man preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of

predatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are

evoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe and

cataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.

Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man

is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his

brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast

is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the

satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of

freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand

against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has

achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed

himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes.

And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out

to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.

Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature

of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but

the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,

institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems

of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized,

established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more

perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom

to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life,

vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well

as of man is the history of a searching for freedom.

Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it

dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon

the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its

rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is

manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime.

When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba,

protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.

For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new

power--the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead

of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just

happen along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist

pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a

new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist.

That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba--a miracle that

freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation. But latent

in that move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the

alligator, the wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and

plant, parasitism and slavery. The device that enabled the ameba to

change its position in space of its own will, and so increased its

freedom immeasureably, meant the generation of infinite evil, pain,

suffering and degradation for billions in the womb of time.

THE BREEDING OF INFERIORITY

Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of

similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example,

furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of

leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and

immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in

miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child

lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds

at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at

night in the services of a stock company.

A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of

every living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world,

from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their

by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after

effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and

free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the

infectious diseases which kill man. The change from parasitism to

slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence. In the

transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in

periodically as its mode of progress.

The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of

individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has

tended to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which

would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which

would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery

infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an

overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ

which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in

that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects

lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the

tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested food present in the intestines

of its host, has no alimentary canal of its own because it needs none.

On the other hand, the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant

use into the most remarkable of efficient weapons.

In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature,

the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature

evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with

countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made

Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has

constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and

assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning

human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would

draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly

humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil

contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in

armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and

employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon

the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the

common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy,

stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with

a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the

sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human.

Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the

image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a

Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so

described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and

Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common

assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and

parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,

the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious

cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and

more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a

geometrically increasing proportion.

This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the

qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself

are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great

pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of

the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from

his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality

of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process

by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and

the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action

of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal

begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.

Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a

brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it

became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the

inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming

problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the

problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government,

that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even

the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and

subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more

to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free

somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of

liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience.

But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not

grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the

essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the

would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole

class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight

every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device

upon device, to retain their spoils.

The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at

last universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems

within grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been

hit upon, that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their

mutual bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them

together. All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected

institutions appeared to culminate in the formula that would

automatically yield Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added

Equality and Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the

formula that would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness.

That formula is: the _democracy of the normals_.

To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the

glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to

be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely

biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether

they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks

the better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be

the raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of

their faculties and powers.

WHAT THE STATESMAN IS UP AGAINST

Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the

statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one

assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what

a democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these

unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of

producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals--or

if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal

lives.

Furthermore you then begin to have the entirely novel possibility in

the world: some sort of collective effort for a collective purpose,

beyond the personal greeds and fears, factions and hatreds. So the

state, instead of fulfilling its old function of serving as the tool

of certain powerful individuals, latterly known as the Big Men, might

be transformed into an instrument toward freedom. With the ideal of a

democracy of the normals ever before him, the statesman could go on

to construct and modify his social machinery. That would entail the

satisfaction not alone of the animal needs, but also the highest

aspirations and therefore the provision of the finest conditions of

life for the normal: those most favorable, stimulative, and assistant

to creative activity. For what else is the content of the idea of

freedom?

Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named

Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and

liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed

up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which

coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species.

A fair fight, a free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto

of natural selection. Where civilization shakes hands with natural

instinct, what but the happiest of results can be expected?

Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles'

heel. Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the

bone, the standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that

the average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In

effect, they are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman

is bound to be defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.

No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of

freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is

bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is

nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the

one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The

intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that

forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total

population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never

develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are

doomed to remain forever subnormal.

THE CAREERISTS AS THE ABNORMALS

The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion. The

careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity.

Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that

America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land

of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the

man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a

thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with

transition links between. One finds him at every level of society.

Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of

the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the

acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him

that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique,

becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist,

the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the

unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the

mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the

feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental

primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The

most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones

because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any

doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as

do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small

percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist

movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of

the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can

the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many

generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?

But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic

sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and

study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe

him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree.

Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he

is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is

using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the

line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and

taken by him is a fascinating process.

The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be

confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion

or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the

careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and

dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the

mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression

of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the

life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too

the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want.

These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor

to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the

respiration business as soon as they are born.

Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather

obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But

there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the

careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and

brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for

some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing

he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or

radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs

and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is

quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the

underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all

ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own

personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red

ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a

hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him

in his ascent.

Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive

type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and

speculation in intellect which mankind is. To say that he is a wolf in

sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he

is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he

is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little

self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it

completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe

is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really

believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at

all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part,

he carries it off very well.

WHY THE STATESMAN FAILS

Slaves and careerists, subnormals and abnormals, are the important

elements of the constituency of every modern statesman. The financial

and social careerists as business men, professionals, artists,

publicists, presidents of countries, politicians, philosophers

dominate his outlook, his plans, his horizon. The slaves, the

inferiors, the subnormals exist merely to be exploited by them. No

one questions the causes of the multiplicity of them. No one asks why

there are so many little lives. For a fundamentally minded statesman

the control of the production of the careerist, why he is produced,

and how he may be prevented, becomes the primary problem of his art.

Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human

nature. The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be

repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from

human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature

to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above

the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great,

wonderful, free community. We are all careerists. In so far as

democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was

in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life

that way than any other way. For himself. And the devil take the

others. The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine

his politics to this very day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors

bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when he does not

throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit,

sectional inertia, or race prejudice.

Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to

be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and

desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in

its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The

servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid.

What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast

who once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of

the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against

the world, men could never have been driven to live together for

twenty-four hours in communities.

The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has

been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist

quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories

of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our

cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an

incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has

been, and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever

the same, there is no way out.

POOR HUMAN NATURE

All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly

delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every

outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity,

incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of

super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal

sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats

who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for

years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German,

American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal

negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report

and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of

omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to

human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general

can be blamed on no one in particular.

Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with

it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the

slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black

fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator

to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority?

Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers

through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every

gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm

of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into

great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid

variants, involve millions in their disease, the idea of freedom

persists obstinately. Have we any reason for regarding it as other

than an illusion?

If freedom is an illusion, we must admit the doom of democracy. And no

Wagnerian crashes of orchestration mitigate the tragedy of the scene

as our eyes are opened to the twilight of our new gods. For what other

social methods are there left to us? In the struggle against nature's

barriers upon human aspiration for perfect satisfactions, it looks as

though every other method has failed us.

In the past, refined aristocracies and benevolent despotisms have

failed as miserably as our democracies are now failing and as we are

sure crude anarchism and communism would. Their inferiority has thrown

them on the scrap heap. As for our present ways of government as a

permanent method, the storage of power in the hands of the Clever Few.

War burns in the lesson of how little the careerist regards either

the subnormal or supernormal. He condemns them all sooner or later to

wholesale slavery and carnage.

Is man then never to be the architect of his own destiny? Are we to

surrender our faith in the future of our kind to the spectacle of a

miserable species sentenced by its own nature to self-destruction? We

thought to rise upon the wings of knowledge and beauty, lured by

the mysteries of color and the magic of design and the might of the

intellect and its words, that have transfigured life into the greatest

adventure ever attempted in time and space. But we find ourselves

merely another experiment, intricate and rather long drawn out, to be

sure, with marvelous pyrotechnics, magnificent effects here and there,

but bound to eliminate itself in the end, to make stuff for the

museums of the real conqueror of the stars yet to come. We are

condemned to be classed with the dodo and the mammoth by the coming

discoverer of an escape from the slave and careerist. And so let

us resign ourselves to fate. Let us eat of the humble bread of the

stoic's consolation in the face of the mocking laughter of the gods,

let us admit that Mind in Man has unconsciously but irretrievably

willed its own self-annihilation. What remains for us except to beat

our breasts and proclaim: So be it, O Lord, so be it?

MAN AS A TRANSIENT

Yet, true as it is that the human animal has achieved no advance

beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed himself from his

bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes, is there no way out

anywhere? Is there perhaps some ground for hope and consolation in the

thought that we, of the twentieth century, no longer see ourselves,

Man, as something final and fixed? Darwin changed Fate from a static

sphinx into a chameleon flux. Just as certainly as man has arisen from

something whose bones alone remain as reminders of his existence, we

are persuaded man himself is to be the ancestor of another creature,

differing as much from him as he from the Chimpanzi, and who, if he

will not supplant and wipe him out, will probably segregate him and

allow him to play out his existence in cage cities.

The vision of this After-man or From-man is really about as helpful to

us as the water of the oasis mirage is to the lost dying of thirst

in the desert. The outcries of the wretched and miserable, the

gray-and-dreary lived din an unmanageable tinnitus in our ears. Like

God, it may be but a large, vague idea toward which we grope to

snuggle up against. It seems implicit in the doctrines of evolution.

But how do we know that in man the spiral of life has not reached its

apex, and that now, even now, the vortices of its descent are not

beginning? How do we know that the From-man is to be a Superman and

not a Subman? How can we dare to hope that the slave-beast-brute is to

give birth to an heir, fine and free and superior?

We do not know and we have every indication and induction for the most

oppositely contrary conclusions. Life has blundered supremely, in,

while making brains its darling, forgetting or helplessly surrendering

to the egoisms of alimentation. So it has spawned a conflict between

its organs, and a consequent impasse in which the lower centres drive

the higher pitilessly into devising means and instruments for the

suicide of the whole.

As War shows plainly to the most stupidly gross imagination, the germs

of our own self-destruction as a species saturate our blood. The

probability looms with almost the certainty of a syllogistic

deduction, that such will be the outcome to our hundreds of thousands

of years of pain upon earth. In the face of that, speculations upon

a comet or gaseous emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing

cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed

in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs

containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others!

What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand

times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring

forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting

at long distance, upon huge masses and over any extent of territory,

is presaged in that single example. But besides thus willing, by an

inner necessity, its own annihilation, Life, in the very structure

and machinery of its being, seems caught into the entanglements of an

inescapable net, an eternity-long bondage it can never rip, to flee

and remake itself into the immortal image that is its God.

And so there go by the board the last alleviations of those unbeatable

optimists who would soothe their aching souls with at least the drop

of comfort: that if man is a mortal species, with not the slightest

prospect of a continuing immortality, not to mention a glorious future

and destiny, there are others. Man, after all, may be simply a bad

habit Life will succeed in shaking off. No philosophy or religion can

afford to be anthropocentric merely. It must include all life and all

living things to which we are blood-related. There are other species

or latent species to take up the torch that burned poor homo sapiens

and ascend the heights. The ant and bee may yet mutate along certain

lines that would make them the masters of the universe.

But no matter what species or variety gets the upper hand in the

struggle for survival and power, the implications of the qualities

necessary to victory in conflicts of individual separate pieces of

protoplasm will be there. Besides, life is always begotten of life.

That is why synthetic protoplasm is nothing but a phrase. It is

impossible to conceive of something alive, possessed of the property

of remembering, that is not possessed of a store of past experiences.

You can no more think of getting rid of these unconscious memories of

protoplasm than you can think of getting rid of the wetness of water.

They are imbedded in the most intimate chemistry of the primeval ameba

as well as in our most complex tissues.

The memories of the cold lone fish and the hot predatory carnivor who

were our begetters, may haunt us to the end of time. The bee and the

ant, too, have woven inextricably into the woof of their cells the

instincts that sooner or later would send their brain ganglia,

even when evolved to the pitch of perfection, to elaborating the

self-and-species murdering inventions and discoveries that are

apparently destined to slay us. The powers of unconscious memory and

unlearnable technique of reaction to experience, once grooved, thus

prove the great gift and the eternal curse of protoplasm. Making it

possible for it to be and become what it is and has, they have

also made it forever impossible for it to be or become its own

contradiction.

Add to this unsloughable remembrance of the past, for better, for

worse, the secretive consciousness of its present needs every living

thing, as against every other living thing, is obsessed with. As a

peregrinating, finite, spatially limited being, it is separated from

all other living beings by inorganic, dead masses, and yet driven to

contact with them by a fundamental impulse to assimilate them into

itself, and make them part of itself. That assimilatory urge is

present in every activity from coarse ingestion as food to the moral

metabolism of the hermit-saint who would influence others to do as he.

FATE AND ANTI-FATE

In effect the history of Life resembles the life history of the

smallest things we know of, the electrons, and the largest, the great

suns and stars of space. The electron begins, perhaps, as a swirl in

the primeval ether, joins other electrons, forms colonies, cities,

empires, elements of an increasing complexity, through stages of a

relative stability, like lead or gold. Until it reaches the stage of

integration which wills its own disintegration, that we have been

taught to look upon with proper awe and reverence as radium. And we

are told that nebulae wander until they collide and give birth to

stars, stars wander and collide and give birth to nebulae. Life begins

as a quivering colloid, goes on painfully to build a brain, which

automatically refines itself to the point of discovering and using

the most efficient methods of destroying others, and by a boomerang

effect, itself. Fate!

The conception of Fate was a Greek idea. The classic formula for

tragedy, the struggle of Man with the sequence of cause and effect

within him and without, that is so utterly beyond his grasp and ken,

or power to modify, originated with them. But they must also be given

the credit for having conceived an idea and started a process which,

at first slowly and gropingly, now slipping and falling, torn and

bleeding among the thorns of the dark forest of human motives,

presently goes on, with a firmer, more practiced, more confident step,

to emerge into the light as the deliberate Conqueror of Fate. That

idea-process, this Anti-Fate is Science.

Science began with the adventures of free-thinking speculators, who

revolted against religious cosmogonies and superstitions. Sceptics

concerning the knowledge that was the accepted monopoly of the

priesthood must have existed in the oldest civilization we know

anything of, more than twenty-five thousand years ago, the

Aurignacians. But it was to the Greeks that we owe that amalgamation

of curiosity delivered of fear, that merger of systematic research

and critical thinking untrammelled by social inhibitions which is the

essence of modern science. Out of them has come the great Tree of

Knowledge of our time, which is, too, the only Ygdrasil of Life,

undying because it lives upon successive generations of human brain

cells.

Science, as the pursuit of the real, began with very small things by

men with very small intentions. Inventories, collections of isolated

data, something permanent for the mind out of the flux of transient

sensations, little tracks and foot paths in the jungle of phenomena,

were their goal. With no sense of themselves as the mightiest of

master-builders, cultivating humility toward their material at any

rate, the little men ploughed their little fields, striking the oil

of a great generalization or classification or explanation with no

fanfare of trumpets.

First as freaks and cranks, then as scholars and pedants, then

protected and perhaps stimulated under the competitive royal patronage

as societies and academies, they prepared for the harvest. Comparing

them to pioneer farmers sowing an undeveloped territory is really

totally inadequate and inaccurate. For the most part, they were like

coral makers, laboriously constructing, with no vision, certainly no

sustained vision, of the whole. To the practical men of affairs, the

shopkeepers and traders, the land-owners and ship-owners, the soldiers

and sailors, the statesmen and politicians, the people who specialized

in maneuvering human beings and materials, they were, for this

futile devotion to abstract knowledge, marked ridiculous and absurd

weaklings, mollycoddles, babies, not to be trusted with the demands

and dangers of public life.

But it so happened remarkably late in history that with the discovery

of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for

industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most

marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not

the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations

at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were

raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science

acquired prestige.

Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the

overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the

factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par

excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors

of human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the

conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of

the race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the

inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into

the drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville

show of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy

scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and

licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.

The future of science has become the future of the race. So much of

an inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated. That is

ordinarily taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man

became the New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental

discoveries and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go

on, providing a succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist

and his retinue. Not only is he to be entertained and served by them,

but any commercial value will also be exploited by him. The natural

wonders of the laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural

absurdities of the medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of

the man in the street. Even spiritualism apes the technique of the

physicist. The credulity of reporters alone concerning developments

in surgery, for example, is incredible. There is enough rot published

daily for a brief to be made out against the idolatry of science.

THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE

Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a

substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept

them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.

The wonder-maker may have forced upon him, may welcome, the honors

of the priest, though he pose as the humble slave of Nature and her

secrets. Presently the foundations and institutes, which coexist with

the cathedrals and churches, just as once the new Christian chapels

and congregations stood side by side with pagan temples and heathen

shrines, may oust their rivals, and assume the monopoly of ritual.

Should its spirit remain fine and clear, should it maintain the

glorious promise of its dawn, should its high priests realize the

perpetually widening intimations of its universal triumph, and escape

the ossification that has overtaken all young and hopeful things and

institutions, the real foundation for a future of the species would be

laid, and so its ultimate suicide prevented.

The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the

redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words.

There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has

often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of

words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a

psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way

of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James,

in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty

definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is

wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits

and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common

merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at

all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual

powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play

the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of

torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along

which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.

SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE

Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can

science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave

origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its

texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be

certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general

stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An

abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and

breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of

course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate

and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric

superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our

social systems.

But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices

and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities,

jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases?

Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they

represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps,

the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas

Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What

future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not

the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of

other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to

which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us:

that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no

future?

That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an incompetent

question to our men of business and affairs. Human nature, as fallen

angel or ape parvenu, has always looked upon itself as fixed for

eternity. "Human nature never changes, and is everywhere and always

will be the same." "As a man is built." "Bred in the bone." These are

the axioms of our social and economic Euclids. Indeed, Man, assuming

that his nature is as uncontrollable as the course of the stars, has

limited his research into the substance of freedom to a groping for an

understanding of the adequate external conditions of liberty. Thus he

set himself another of the insoluble problems he seems to delight

in by neglecting the most important factor in the equation. Yet the

invisible soul of man, ignored, as a variable, varying quantity, has

upset all societies and constitutions, and all schemes of bondage as

well as of freedom.

For freedom, it becomes obvious as soon as it is clearly stated, is

sheer impossibility until the internal conditions of his nature

are ascertained, and the way paved for their control. A simple

illustration of the working of this principle is supplied by our

democracies, grossly pretenders. How can a democracy be possible

without a knowledge of the control of the individually and socially

subnormal, who, since they offer themselves to exploitation by

the careerists, prove themselves the weak links in the chain of

co-operation with an equal opportunity for all, that is the democratic

ideal? In what does the equality or inequality of men consist? Just

what are the qualities necessary for successful competition, or if you

will, co-living, of man with his fellow-men, and how and why do they

operate? No freedom, independent of the servile repetitions of

history and heredity, is conceivable until these inquiries have been

elaborately carried out toward a certain working finality.

THE PROMISES OF EUGENICS

There are, to be sure, the claims and assertions and negative

achievements of the youngest of the sciences, eugenics. They are

invincible optimists, the eugenists: it is perhaps a case of a virtue

born of necessity. Thus Francis Galton, in the preface to the "Bible

of Eugenics," his essays on Hereditary Genius, declares: "There is

nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of

evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed

who shall be as much superior, mentally and morally, to the Modern

European, as the Modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races."

High hopes beat in this declaration. But Galton could not have

foreseen that the signing of a scrap of paper by one of the Modern

Europeans would let loose all the other Modern Europeans in a

pandemonium of horrors the lowest of the Negro races could not but

envy as a masterpiece of its kind. It seemed to be suspiciously easy

for him to accept an excuse to slide down the dizzy height he had

climbed from the African level.

The eugenists would put their trust in the encouraged breeding of the

best and the compulsory sterility of the rest. But what is the best,

and who are the best, and where will you find them when they are not

inextricably emulsified with the worst? It's a long, long way to the

day of a segregating out and in of Mendelian unit-characters. Besides,

this is a strange world of choices. Nobody is to be considered worthy

of parenthood until he has fallen in love properly. Nobody who would

permit an outsider's decision as to when he was properly in love would

be worth thirty cents as a parent. There is the ultimate dilemma

of the eugenist--the dilemma which destroys forever the dream of a

control of parenthood from the point of view of merely psychic values.

NEW PSYCHOLOGY

There are the claims and outcries and promises of the

psychologists--the specialists in the probing of the human soul and

human nature. In our time, the demand for a dynamic psychology of

process and becoming, psychology with an energy in it, has split them

into two schools--the emphasizers of instinct and the subconscious,

the McDougallians, and the pleaders for sex and the unconscious, the

Freudians. A synthesis between these two groups is latent, since their

differences are those of horizon merely. For the McDougallians look

upon the world with two eyes and see it whole and broad--the Freudians

see through their telescope a circular field and exclaim that they

behold the universe. It is true that they own a telescope.

But what has either to offer our quest for light on the future of

the species? Nothing very much. Thus, to turn to the disciples

of McDougall. In a recent volume entitled, "Human Nature and its

Remaking," Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard contends that

Man, all axioms about his nature to the contrary, is but a creature

of habit, and so the most plastic of living things, since habit is

self-controlled and self-determined. By the self-determination of the

habits of the race will the new freedom be reborn. It sounds old,

very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent

ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex,

fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of

civilization. It is the bubble of education all over again. What in

our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our

blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are

respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must

remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental

barracks.

Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe.

They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. Layer upon layer,

cross-section upon cross-section have been piled before us. And what

a melodramatic cinema of thrills and shivers, villains and heroes,

heroines and adventuresses have they not unfolded. Each motive, as

the stiff psychologist of the nineteenth century, with his

plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeon holes and classifications,

labelled the teeming creatures of the mind, becomes anon a strutting

actor upon a multitudinous stage, and an audience in a crowded

playhouse. Scenes are enacted the febrile fancy of a Poe or a de

Maupassant never could have conjured. The complex, the neurosis, the

compulsion, the obsession, the slip of speech, the trick of manner,

the devotion of a life-time, the culture of a nation all furnish bits

for the Freudian mosaic. Attractions and inhibitions, repulsions and

suppressions are held up as the ultimate pulling and pushing forces of

human nature.

But is the problem solved? Is not human nature primarily animal

nature? And do we so thoroughly understand this animal nature? Does

not all this material of Freudianism consist of variations upon social

burdens imposed on the original human nature? To be sure, at every

moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the

clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and

defeat for the others. But the Freudian material per se--the sex

material--is it not merely the by-product of a certain state of

society? A sane society would eliminate nearly all of Freudian

disease, but still have original human nature upon its hands. Why is

it that of two individuals exposed to the same situation, one will

develop a complex, the other will remain immune? The only soil we know

of, the real foundation stones of our being and living, are the cells

we are made of. Tell me the cellular basis of a complex, and I will

grant that you have arrived at some real knowledge.

WAY FOR THE PHYSIOLOGIST

There has grown up, contemporaneously with the teachings of Freud,

a body of discoveries and knowledge in physiology, concerning

these factors, which is like a long sword of light illuminating a

pitch-black spot in the night. The dark places in human nature seem to

have become the sole monopoly of the Freudians and their psychology.

But only seemingly. For all this time the physiologist has been

working. Beginning with a candle and now holding in his hands the most

powerful arc-lights, he has explored two regions, the sympathetic

nervous system and the glands of internal secretion, and has come upon

data which in due course will render a good many of the Freudian

dicta obsolete. Not that the Freudian fundamentals will be scrapped

completely. But they will have to fit into the great synthesis which

must form the basis of any control of the future of human nature. That

future belongs to the physiologist. Already his achievements provide

the foundations. I propose in the following chapters to sketch the

history and outline the elements of this new knowledge, and then to

glimpse some of the larger human reactions to it. A good deal of this

new knowledge is not altogether new. A number of the isolated facts

have been known and talked about for more than two generations. But

the newer additions, and the light they have thrown upon old problems

present the opportunity for a synthesis, which must sooner or later be

made.

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE SOUL

Besides, it is time that the secrets of the laboratories stepped out

into the market place, unashamed. Imaginative man has played for ages

immemorial with wondrous fairy tales and fancies of what he would

achieve. The sciences of physics and chemistry have made everyday

commonplace realities out of his radiant dreams. One need not repeat

the clichés of our editors. But the analogy is there nevertheless. No

control over heat and light and electricity, today our slaves, was

possible until physics and chemistry took them in hand. No control of

the human soul is possible until it too will be taken in hand by them.

We may now look forward to a real future for mankind because we have

before us the beginnings of a chemistry of human nature. The internal

secretions, with their influence upon brain and nervous system as

well as every other part of the body corporation, as essentially

blood-circulating chemical substances, have been discovered the real

governors and arbiters of instincts and dispositions, emotions and

reactions, characters and temperaments, good and bad. A huge complex

of evidence, as various, complicated and obscure as human nature

itself, supports that fundamental law.

The chemistry of the soul! Magnificent phrase! It's a long, long way

to that goal. The exact formula is as yet far beyond our reach. But we

have started upon the long journey and we shall get there. Then will

Man truly become the experimental animal of the future, experimenting

not only with the external conditions of his life, but with the

constituents of his very nature and soul. The chemical conditions of

his being, including the internal secretions, are the steps of the

ladder by which he will climb to those dizzy heights where he will

stretch out his hands and find himself a God. Modern knowledge of

these chemical substances, circulating in the blood, and affecting

every cell of the body, dates back scarce half a century. But already

the paths blazed by the pioneers have led to the exploration of great

countries. The thyroid gland, the pituitary gland, the adrenal glands,

the thymus, the pineal, the sex glands, have yielded secrets. And

certain great postulates have been established. The life of every

individual, normal or abnormal, his physical appearance, and his

psychic traits, are dominated largely by his internal secretions. All

normal as well as abnormal individuals are classifiable according to

the internal secretions which rule in their make-up. Individuals,

families, nations and races show definite internal secretion traits,

which stamp them with the quality of difference. The internal

secretion formula of an individual may, in the future, constitute his

measurement which will place him accurately in the social system.

"More and more we are forced to realize that the general form and

external appearance of the human body depends, to a large extent,

upon the functioning, during the early developmental period, of the

endocrine glands. Our stature, the kinds of faces we have, the

length of our arms and legs, the shape of the pelvis, the color and

consistency of the integument, the quantity and regional location

of our subcutaneous fat, the amount and distribution of hair on our

bodies, the tonicity of our muscles, the sound of the voice, and

the size of the larynx, the emotions to which our exterior gives

expression. All are to a certain extent conditioned by the

productivity of our glands of internal secretion." (Llewellys F.

Barker, Johns Hopkins University, 1st President of Association for

Study of Internal Secretions.)

The implications for the statesman, the educator, the vocational

expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents,

deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the

commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and

dull types, as well as of those two master interests of mankind, Sex

and War, are manifest. The mystery of the individual, in all his

distinct uniqueness, begins to be penetrated. And so every phase

of social life, in which the individual is at bottom the final

determinant, must be reviewed in the light of the new knowledge.

History may be examined from an entirely new angle. The biographies

of our Heroes of the Past, in the Carlylean sense, will bear

reinspection. Even Utopias will have to be revised.

The internal secretions constitute and determine much of the inherited

powers of the individual and their development They control physical

and mental growth and all the metabolic processes of fundamental

importance. They dominate all the vital functions during the three

cycles of life. They co-operate in an intimate relationship which may

be compared to an interlocking directorate. A derangement of their

function, causing an insufficiency of them, an excess, or an

abnormality, upsets the entire equilibrium of the body, with

transforming effects upon the mind and the organs. In short, they

control human nature, and whoever controls them, controls human

nature.

The control of the glands of internal secretion waits upon our

knowledge of them, the nature and precise composition of the

substances manufactured by them, and just what they do to the cells.

Envisaging the future, that knowledge today is meagre. Looking back

fifty years, it becomes an amazing achievement and revelation. It is

worth our while to survey the accomplished, and to trace its general

human significance. For a certain tangible degree of knowledge and

control has been attained and should be part of the average citizen's

equipment in dealing with the everyday problems of his life.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE LABORATORY

A certain number of so-called experimental physiologists, that is,

the physiologists of the animal laboratory, who will have nothing but

syllogistic deductions and quantitative determinations based upon

animal experiments as the data of their science, will be apt to look

askance upon the preceding paragraphs, and those which will follow. To

them, any man who relates the internal secretions to anything, outside

of the routineer's paths, puts his reputation at stake, if he has

any reputation at all to start in with. They would have us deliver

a Scotch verdict upon all the questions which arise as soon as one

attempts to take in the more general significance of the glands of

internal secretion. This, even though the more general implications

concerning the effects of their products, the relations of them to

growth and development, nutrition and energy, environmental

reactions and resistance to disease, as well as the grand complex of

intelligence, are admittedly well ascertained in some directions.

The method of absolute measurement in science has yielded miracles.

For some thousands of years, an isolated individual, here and there

or an isolated institution have devoted themselves to the task,

struggling not only with their own weaknesses, but with religious and

political dogmas which spoiled and vitiated even the beginnings of

their efforts. When, in the seventeenth century, men associated

themselves in research, for free communication and discussion of their

findings, a great invention came alive. Close on its heels was born

the exact experimental method. Amazing triumphs were born of that

marriage which swept away before it ignorance and superstition and

prejudice. Its children and grandchildren have flourished and grown

strong and mighty. They have transmuted the material conditions of

life. Certainly all the laurels belong to the method of absolute,

measured observations.

Yet all this time the old method of inductive observation has not gone

dead. Most magnificent triumph of nineteenth century science, the

evolution theory of Charles Darwin, remains the most conspicuous

instance of clarification of thought in human history. That work was

the outcome of an attempt to relate and interpret a collection of

observations on species and their variations, that had long lain to

hand, a mixture without a solvent. Darwin saw certain generalizations

as solvents, and behold! a clear solution out of the mud. But it was

by piling evidence upon evidence, co-ordinating isolated facts not

directly associated, that the towering structure was erected. There is

no prettier sample extant of the powers of the inductive method.

Not that there are no triumphs of the quantitative method in store for

the biologist. Already, the materials of the Mendelians have become

basic parts of his structure. And today, in pursuit of the solutions

of hundreds of the problems of living matter, chemists and

physiologists are employing the most precise standards, units, and

measures of the physical sciences. Blood chemistry of our time is a

marvel, undreamed of a generation ago. Also, these achievements are

a perfect example of the accomplished fact contradicting a priori

prediction and criticism. For it was one of the accepted dogmas of the

nineteenth century that the phenomena of the living could never be

subjected to accurate quantitative analysis.

However desirable the purely quantitative experimental methods may be,

they naturally need always to be preceded by the qualitative studies

of direct observations. Inevitably there will be numberless errors,

apparent and real inconsistencies and contradictions, and ideas that

will have to be discarded. Just the same there is no other method of

progress. Every bit of evidence points towards the internal secretions

as the holders of the secrets of our inmost being. They are the well

springs of life, the dynamos of the organism. In trailing their scent

we appear to be upon the track not only of the chemistry of our

bodies, but of the chemistry of our very souls. An increasing host of

factors and studies marshal themselves solidly for that declaration.

Endeavor to conceive the consequences and possibilities for the

future. A synthesis of the known in the field provides even now a

means of understanding and control of the perplexities of human nature

and life that are like a vista seen from a mountain top after the

lifting of a fog.

The most precious bit of knowledge we possess today about Man is that

he is the creature of his glands of internal secretion. That is, Man

as a distinctive organism is the product, the by-product, of a number

of cell factories which control the parts of his make-up. Much as the

different divisions of an automobile concern produce the different

parts of a car. These chemical factories consist of cells, manufacture

special substances, which act upon the other cells of the body and so

start and determine the countless processes we call Life. Life, body

and soul emerge from the activities of the magic ooze of their silent

chemistry precisely as a tree of tin crystals arises from the chemical

reactions started in a solution of tin salts by an electric current.

Man is regulated by his Glands of Internal Secretion. At the beginning

of the third decade of the twentieth century, after he had struggled,

for we know at least fifty thousand years, to define and know himself,

that summary may be accepted as the truth about himself. It is

a far-reaching induction, but a valid induction, supported by a

multitude of detailed facts.

Amazingly enough, the incontestable evidence, that first pointed to,

and then proved up to the hilt, this answer to the question: What is

Man? has been gathered in less than the last fifty years. Darwin and

Huxley, and Spencer, who first opened men's eyes to their origins,

were ignorant of the very existence of some of them, and had not the

faintest notion or suspicion of the real importance or function of any

of them.

THE PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

Now, there are certain prejudices and problems which appear to be

rudely brushed away by the dogmatic arrogance of the principle stated.

What, you say, is Man but an affair of his peculiar gland chemistry?

But what of mind, soul, consciousness? Still another of these

pathetically one-sided and superficial theories of man as a machine

pure and simple which would make him the most complicated of

mechanisms, a marvel of intricate parts, but would deprive him of his

essence as self-conscious unique in the universe. Man, thinking man,

at any rate, dreads to lose the cherished impregnable conviction that

he is something apart, inherently, and therefore infinitely different

from every other phenomenon in the range of his cosmos.

A thorough dissection of the relation and attitude toward psychic

material of the consistent physiologist, who refuses to deal in

contradictory terms, would lead us a little too far. So would the

reconciliation between the claims of mind and the concept of the

organism as a system of chemical reactions. The most fundamental

aspects of that herculean task, warned by the sign, No Trespassing,

we shall leave to the metaphysicians. The influence of the glands of

internal secretion upon the mind we must consider, but at present

postpone. Yet the hot-headed contenders on both sides may be reminded

of certain facts.

We live in the most iconoclastic of ages. There are sane people alive

today going quietly about their business who deny the very existence

of consciousness. These heretics of course pooh-pooh absolutely the

lions of metaphysics. On the other hand, it may be pointed out to our

mechanists who believe in mechanism to the bitter end, that even if

man can be described entirely as a mere transformer of energy, there

is no reason why he cannot also be described as a transformer of

energy plus someone who makes use of the transformer and of the

energy transformed. The stone wall before the honest mechanist is the

abolition of purpose, and design, an old insoluble problem upon

his premises. Preach, until you are blue in the face, behaviorist

tropisms, in which man is pushed and pulled about in his environment

as are iron filings in a magnetic field. Think up objective

physiologies in which your life and mine become a series of

concatenated influences and compound reflexes. Play with words like

the concentration reflex when you mean idea, and the symbolic reflex

when you mean language. But your most rigid nomenclature will never

abolish the mystic personal purpose in the equation, no matter how low

the step in the animal series to which you descend. The declaration

that a man is dominated by certain glands within his body should not

be taken to give aid and comfort to those who would banish mind from

the universe.

CHAPTER I

HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE DISCOVERED

Just what are the glands of internal secretion? And how have we become

possessed of whatever information about them we have? A brief review

of how the idea of a gland of internal secretion came into the human

mind and of the contributions that have converged into a single body

of knowledge is worth while.

A gland is a collection of cells (those viscous globules which are the

units of all tissues and organs). It manufactures substances intended

for a particular effect upon the body economy. The effect may be

either local or upon the body as a whole.

Originally, a gland meant something in the body which was seen to make

something else, generally a juice or a liquid mixture of some sort.

A classical example is the salivary glands elaborating saliva. The

microscope has shown us that every gland is a chemical factory in

which the cells are the workers. The product of the gland work is its

secretion. Thus the sweat glands of the skin secrete the perspiration

as their secretion, the lachrymal glands of the eyes the tears as

theirs. The collectivism of management and control is the only

essential difference between them and the modern soap factory or

T.N.T. plant.

Man as a carnivor, and as a consequent anatomist, has been acquainted

with these more superficially placed glands for some thousands of

years. During all this time and during the epoch of the achievements

of gross anatomy, it was believed that the secretions of all glands

were poured out upon some surface of the body. Either an exterior

surface like the skin, or some interior surface, the various mucous

membranes. This was supported by the discovery of canal-like passage

ways leading from the gland to the particular surface where its

secretion was to act. These corridors, the secretory or excretory

ducts, are present, for example, in the liver, conducting the bile

to the small intestine. Devices of transportation fit happily into

a comparison of a gland to a chemical factory, corresponding thus

closely to the tramways and railroads of our industrial centers.

Little more than a hundred years ago, it was observed that certain

organs, like the thyroid body in the neck, and the adrenal capsules in

the abdomen, hitherto neglected because their function was hopelessly

obscure, had a glandular structure. As in so much scientific advance,

the discovery or improvement of a new instrument or method, a fresh

tool of research, was responsible. The perfection of the microscope

was the reason this time.

If one wishes to trace the idea of internal secretion by cells to an

individual, it is convenient, if not pedantic, to give the credit to

Theophile de Bordeu, a famous physician of Paris in the eighteenth

century. Bordeu came to Paris as a brilliant provincial in his early

twenties and by the charm of his manner and daring therapy fought

his way to the most exclusive aristocratic practice of the court.

Naturally a courtier, taking to the intrigues of the royal court like

a duck to water, making enemies on every hand as well as friends, and

with a fastidious and impatient clientele, he yet found time to dabble

in the wonders of the newly perfected microscope and to speculate upon

the meaning of the novelties revealed by it in the tissues. _He coined

the thought of a gland secretion into the blood_.

It was in the year 1749 that he came to Paris from the Pyrenees,

a young medical graduate, destined to become the most fashionable

practitioner of his time. At the age of twenty-three he was holding

the professorship of anatomy at his alma mater, Montpelier, where

his father was a successful physician. At twenty-five he was elected

corresponding member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. A handsome

presence and a Tartarin de Tarascon disposition assured his success

from the start. The medical world was then composed of the emulsion of

charlatanry and science Molière ridiculed. Success stimulated envy and

jealousy. One of the richest of the older medical men set himself the

job of procuring his scalp. On a trumped-up charge of stealing jewels

from a dead patient--a favorite accusation against the doctors of the

eighteenth century--he had Bordeu's license taken away from him. The

good graces of certain women to whom Bordeu had always appealed, and

who indeed supplied the funds to get him started in Paris, rammed

through two acts of Parliament to reinstate him. Nothing daunted, he

returned to his quest for a court clientele, and was rewarded finally

by having the moribund Louis XV as a patient.

This was the man with whom the modern history of the internal

secretions begins. Not content with adventures among the courtiers and

desperadoes of the most corrupt court in the most corrupt city of the

world, he went in for research. The high power microscope that came

into vogue when he was studying, revealed vague wonders which he

described in a monograph, "Researches into the mucous tissues or

cellular organs." But what makes him interesting is a slender volume

on the "Medical Analysis of the Blood," published in the year of the

American Declaration of Independence. The sexual side of men and women

aroused Bordeu's most ardent enthusiasms. Starting with observations

on the characters of eunuchs and capons, as well as spayed female

animals, he formulated a conception of sexual secretions absorbed

into the blood, settling the male or female tint of the organism and

setting the seal upon the destiny of the individual. Thus he must be

donated the credit of anticipating the most modern doctrine on the

subject.

The generation after him witnessed the triumph of the cell as the

recognized unit of structure of the tissues, the brick of the organs.

It was soon found that the cells of the more familiar glands, like

the sweat or tear glands, resembled the cells of the more mysterious

structures named the thyroid in the neck, or adrenal in the abdomen,

of which the function was unknown. What had hitherto prevented

classification of the latter as glands was the fact that they

possessed no visible pathways for the removal of their secretion. So

now they were set apart as the _ductless_ glands, the glands without

ducts, as contrasted with the glands normally equipped with ducts.

Since, too, they were observed to have an exceedingly rich supply of

blood, the blood presented itself as the only conceivable mode of

egress for the secretions packed within the cells. So they were also

called the blood or vascular glands.

The names which became most popular were those which represented a

contrast of the glands with the ducts, conveying their secretion to

the exterior, as the glands of EXTERNAL SECRETION and the glands

without the ducts, the secretions of which were kept within the body,

absorbed by the blood and lymph to be used by the other cells, as

the glands of INTERNAL SECRETION. How different these two classes

of glands are may be realized by imagining the existence of great

factories manufacturing food products, which would diffuse through

their walls into the atmosphere, to be absorbed by our bodies.

There are certain terms for the glands of internal secretion which

are used interchangeably. They are spoken of often as the _endocrine_

glands and as the _hormone_ producing glands. Endocrine is most

convenient for it stands for both the gland and its secretion. Hormone

is employed a good deal in the literature of the subject. But it

applies specifically to the internal secretion, and not to the gland.

THE EXPERIMENTAL PIONEER

All this clarification of the concept of the glands of internal

secretion occurred in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

However, no inkling of their real importance to the body, of which

quantitatively they form so insignificant a part, was apparently

revealed to anyone. Not even the most daring speculation or brilliant

guess work in physiology engaged them as material. Thus Henle, the

great anatomist, calmly affirmed that these glands "have no influence

on animal life: they may be extirpated or they degenerate without

sensation or motion suffering in the least." Johann Müller, the most

celebrated physiologist of his day and contemporary of Henle, wrote

in 1844 and coolly stated, "The ductless glands are alike in one

particular--they either produce a different change in the blood which

circulates through them or the lymph which they elaborate plays a

special rôle in the formation of blood or of chyle." In other words,

they were dismissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance

to the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art of

Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science is more

interesting than the progress of that science itself. He might have

added that nothing either was more interesting than the contradictions

in that progress. For while these grand moguls of their sciences were

enunciating their dogmas, pioneers here and there were already setting

the mines that were to explode them.

The experimental method, to the value of which biologists were

just beginning to awaken, was destined to be the vehicle of Time's

revenges. An application of it to the mysteries of sex was the

immediate occasion. Sex and sex differences have always more or less

obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes of theories about

them would constitute a respectable museum. Certain gross facts,

however, were known. The effects of loss of the sex glands upon the

configuration of the body and the predominating constitution in

animals and eunuchs have always attracted attention. The proverbs and

stories of all nations are full of references to them. But up to the

nineteenth century no controlled experimental work was ever carried

out regarding them. It was in 1849, that A.A. Berthold of Göttingen, a

quiet, sedate lecturer, carried out the pioneer experiment of removing

the testes of four roosters and transplanting them under the skin. It

was Berthold's idea to test whether a gland with a definite external

secretion, and a duct through which that secretion was expelled,

but which yet had powers over the body as a whole that were to be

attributed only to an internal secretion, could not be shown, by

a clean-cut experiment, to possess such an internal secretion. He

succeeded perfectly. For he found that, though, in thus separating the

gland from its duct and so cutting off its external secretion, the

action of the cells manufacturing that secretion was destroyed, the

general effects upon the body were not those of castration. The

animals retained their male characteristics as regards voice,

reproductive instinct, fighting spirit and growth of comb and wattles.

Whereas if the glands were entirely removed, these male traits,

peculiar to the rooster, were completely lost. The inference was the

existence of an internal secretion.

To Berthold belongs the honor of being the first experimental

demonstrator who proved the reality of a gland with a true internal

secretion and the power it exercised through the blood upon the

entire organism. Besides, he showed that a typical gland of external

secretion could also have an internal secretion, a possibility never

before considered. That two kinds of cells could live within the same

gland: one set usually recognized as producing the external secretion,

the other evolving the internal secretion, was an astounding original

conception.

ENTER CLAUDE BERNARD

Science is supposed to be immune to the personal prejudices and

emotional habits of the vulgar. It is the tradition that a new

contribution to knowledge emerging from no matter how obscure the

source, should be hailed as a gift from the gods. But the sad truth of

the matter is that a new finding in science requires as much backing

as a new project in high finance or social climbing. Berthold, like

Mendel, the founder of genetics, was a great pioneer. But there was no

personage, no person of consequence, with no patronage by anyone of

consequence, no wife or kin, to push him, and no audience to stimulate

him. His poor four little pages of a report, published ten years

before Darwin's "Origin of Species," attracted not the slightest

notice. Buried in the print of a journal with a subscription list of

possibly two or three hundred, of whom perhaps two dozen may have been

interested enough to read it, but without any recorded reaction on the

part of any of them, it was a flash in the pan. Though it was good,

original, conclusive stuff, it was cut dead, absolutely, by the

scientific world. As a result, forty years elapsed before the

implications of his studies were rediscovered by the Columbus of the

modern approach to the internal secretions, the American Frenchman,

Brown-Séquard.

It took a first class man of genius in his field, in Paris, with a

respected position in the whirl of its medical planetary system and

a university appointment, to boom and advertise the doctrine of the

internal secretions, so that people began to sit up and listen and

take sides--on the wrong grounds. This Frenchman was Claude Bernard.

At a series of lectures on experimental physiology delivered at the

College of France, in 1855, he coined the terms internal secretion and

external secretion and emphasized the opposition between them, on the

basis of an incorrect example, the function of the liver in the supply

of sugar to the blood.

Just as Columbus reached America, carried on a series of logical

syllogisms, built upon unreal pictures of a straight path to the East,

Claude Bernard opened up the continent of the internal secretions to

the experimental enthusiasts of his time by a discovery which today

is not grouped among the phenomena of internal secretion at all. In

attempting to throw light upon the disease diabetes, in which there

is a loss of the normal ability of the cells to burn up sugar, he

examined the sugar content of the blood in different regions of the

body. He found that the blood of the veins, in general, contained less

sugar than the blood of the arteries, which meant that sugar was taken

from the blood in passing through the tissues. But the venous blood of

the right side of the heart contained as much sugar as the arterial

blood. Evidently, somewhere, sugar was added to the blood in the veins

before it got to the heart. The blood of the vein which goes from

the liver to the right side of the heart was then found to contain a

higher percentage of sugar than is present in the arteries. The vein

which transmits the blood from the intestines to the liver had

the usual lower percentage of sugar corresponding to the analysis

established for the other veins. The liver, therefore, must add sugar

to the blood on its way to the heart. Extraction of the liver then

revealed the presence in it of a form of starch, an animal starch,

which Bernard called glycogen, the sugar-maker. The origin of the

sugar added to the blood on its way from the liver to the heart was

thus settled. Bernard went on to hail glycogen and the sugar derivable

as the internal secretions of the liver, and to erect, and then drive

home, a theory of internal secretions and their importance in the body

economy.

The case he had hit upon was exquisitely fortunate, as the liver had

hitherto been regarded purely a gland of external secretion, the bile.

Nowadays, glycogen and the blood sugar are not considered internal

secretions, because they are classified as elementary reserve food,

while the concept of the internal secretions has become narrowed down

to substances acting as starters or inhibitors of different processes.

Moreover, the process of liberation of sugar from glycogen itself in

the liver, upon demand, is today set down to the action of an internal

secretion, adrenalin. Claude Bernard's conception, like a novelist's

characters, has turned upon its creator, taken on a life of its own,

and evolved into something he never intended. He looked upon an

internal secretion as simply maintaining the normal composition of the

blood, which bathed alike and treated alike the democracy of cells.

Today, the blood is believed merely the transporting medium for the

internal secretion, destined for a particular group of cells.

ADDISON'S AS THE FIRST ENGLISH CONTRIBUTION

The years 1855-56 are red-letter years in the history of the glands of

internal secretion. They witnessed, not only the publication of

Claude Bernard's "Lectures on Experimental Physiology," but also the

appearance of a monograph by Thomas Addison, an English physician,

entitled "On the constitutional and local effects of disease of the

suprarenal bodies." In this, he described a fatal disease during which

the individual affected became languid and weak, and developed a dingy

or smoky discoloration of the whole surface of the body, a browning

or bronzing of the skin, caused generally by destructive tuberculous

disease of the suprarenal or adrenal bodies. Addison promptly put down

these constitutional effects of loss of the adrenal bodies to loss

of something produced by them of constitutional importance. He was

particularly struck by the change in the pigmentation of the skin, so

much so that his own designation for the affection was "bronzed

skin." Since then, however, the condition has been universally styled

Addison's Disease.

There is something spectacularly mysterious and picturesque about most

of the malign, insidious effects of the disease which appealed at once

to a number of investigators. The most adventurous, the most daring,

the most imbued with enthusiasm for the experimental method, was the

American Frenchman, Brown-Séquard, who is acknowledged the father of

modern knowledge of the glands of internal secretion, though to Claude

Bernard belong the honors of the grandfather.

BROWN-SÉQUARD THE GREAT

Brown-Séquard, as the outstanding figure in the history of the glands

of internal secretion, deserves some notice as a personality. In the

words of the note-makers for novels and plays, he was a card. He was

born in 1817 at Port-Louis, on the island of Mauritius, off Africa,

then French property. His father was a Mr. Brown, an American sea

captain; his mother a Mme. Séquard, a Frenchwoman. Early in childhood,

the father sailed away on one of his voyages and never came back. The

mother thereafter supported herself and her son sewing embroideries.

At fifteen, Brown-Séquard, with the physical appearance of an Indian

Creole, was clerking in a colonial store by day, and composing poetry,

romances and plays by night. The call of Paris was in his blood, which

was indeed a supersaturated solution of wanderlust.

Soon he was landed there to make his fortune in literature, only too

speedily to be disillusioned. Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading

literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into

business. He would have none of either and studied medicine instead,

earning his way by teaching as he learned. In the laboratories, he

made the acquaintance of people who more than once were to be his

salvation in the ups and downs of his career. In 1848 he was one of

the secretaries of the Society of Biology, newly founded by Claude

Bernard.

Some trouble, perhaps some effect upon his health of cholera which

then swept Paris, caused him to return to his native Mauritius, to

encounter an epidemic of cholera. There he slaved manfully, for which

a gold medal was afterward struck for him. That over with, he embarked

in 1852 for New York, without a word of American, learning English on

board. This was the first of a series of voyages. As he often boasted,

he crossed the ocean sixty times, not a bad record for the days when

the _Mauretania_ was still in the womb of time. He made a hopeless

failure out of practice in New York, became so poor as to practice

obstetrics at five dollars a case, and married a niece of Daniel

Webster. Then he went back to Paris. Back to America next as Professor

of Physiology at the University of Richmond, Virginia, a job occupied

for a few months only because of his opinions on slavery, ostensibly

anyhow.

To Paris then the rolling stone meandered again. So that soon after he

was offered and accepted the charge of a great newly opened hospital

for epileptics in London. That proved merely an interlude and in

1863 we find him back in his fatherland (if we may hold France his

motherland) as Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard. In New York

fame preceded him now with a thousand trumpets, so that on the day of

his arrival, he was kept busy seeing patients until night, when he

had to desist because of exhaustion. But still he did not prosper. An

unfortunate second marriage almost broke his heart, and an attempt

to found in New York a new medical periodical, the _Archives of

Scientific and Practical Medicine and Surgery_, got him into hot

water. Not until the death of Claude Bernard in 1878 left vacant the

chair of physiology in the College of France, did he find peace and

rest. He hastened to Paris, was appointed, and lived, in spite of the

most erratic of existences, to the ripe old age of 78, working up to

the last minute.

Addison's monograph stimulated Brown-Séquard, in the year after its

printing, to reproduce the fatal disease experimentally by excising

the suprarenal capsules in animals. Addison was very modest in his

monograph. He stated that the first case of the malady had been

reported by his great predecessor at Guy's Hospital, London, Richard

Bright, the describer of Bright's Disease. Then he talks about the

"curious facts" he had "stumbled upon" and refers to an "ill-defined

impression" that these suprarenal bodies, in common with the spleen

and other organs, "in some way or other minister to the elaboration of

the blood." In the preface to his work he had spoken more confidently

of the fact that Nature, as an experimenter and a vivisector, can

beat the physiologist to a frazzle. Indeed, he begins like this: "If

Pathology be to disease what Physiology is to health, it appears

reasonable to conclude that, in any given structure or organ, the laws

of the former will be as fixed and significant as those of the latter:

and that the peculiar characters of any structure or organ may be as

certainly recognized in the phenomena of disease as in the phenomena

of health. Although pathology, therefore, as a branch of medical

science, is necessarily founded on physiology, questions may

nevertheless arise regarding the true character of a structure or

organ, to which occasionally the pathologist may be able to return a

more satisfactory and decisive reply than the physiologist--these two

branches of medical knowledge being thus found mutually to advance and

illustrate each other. Indeed, as regards the functions of individual

organs, the mutual aids of these two branches of knowledge are

probably much more nearly balanced than many may be disposed to admit:

for in estimating them we are very apt to forget how large an amount

of our present physiological knowledge respecting the functions of

these organs has been the immediate result of casual observations made

on the effects of disease." William James expressed the same thought

some decades later, when he emphasized that the abnormal was but the

normal exaggerated and magnified, played upon by the limelight, and

therefore the best teacher and indicator of the exact definition and

limitations of the normal.

Addison, speaking before the South London Medical Society in 1849,

declared that in all of three afflicted individuals there was found a

diseased condition of the suprarenal capsules, and that in spite of

the consciousness "of the bias and prejudice inseparable from the hope

or vanity of an original discovery ... he could not help entertaining

a very strong impression that these hitherto mysterious organs--the

suprarenal capsules--may be either directly or indirectly concerned

in sanguification (the making of the blood): and that a diseased

condition of them, functional or structural, may interfere with the

proper elaboration of the body generally, or of the red particles more

especially...." A modern, acquainted with after developments, would

say that Addison was very hot upon the trail indeed. But withal,

though he must have been well aware of John Hunter's advice to Jenner

on vaccination, "Don't think, make some observations," his training in

the indirect reasoning and deductions of the clinician prevented him

from going right on to a direct experimental test of his theories.

This Brown-Séquard proceeded to do. Removing the adrenal glands in

several species of animals, he found, meant a terrible weakness in

twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and death shortly after. If only one

were removed, there was no change apparent in the normal animal, but

death occurred rapidly upon removal of the other, even after a long

interval. Furthermore, transfusion of blood from a normal into

one deprived of its suprarenals prevented death for a long time,

indicating that the suprarenals normally secreted something into the

blood necessary to life.

The years 1855-1856 beheld two other important glands of internal

secretion, the thyroid, the gland in the neck astride the windpipe,

and the thymus, in the chest above the heart, make their debut.

The thymus was introduced by the great classic monograph of Friedleben

on the "Physiology of the Thymus," in which he mentioned the usual

forgotten pioneers: Felix Plater, a Swiss physician, who in 1614 had

found an enlarged thymus in an infant dying suddenly, and Restelli,

an Italian, who interested himself in the effects of removal of the

thymus more than ten years before. Friedleben believed that in the

young without a thymus, there occurred a softening of the bones, and

general physical and mental deterioration. He started the ball rolling

for a number of researches.

Moritz Schiff, of Frankfort-on-the-Main, showed that excision of the

thyroid gland in dogs is invariably fatal. A number of physicians in

the first half of the century had reported certain remarkable symptoms

associated with enlargement of the thyroid gland, as goitre. In 1825

the collected posthumous writings of Caleb Perry, an eminent physician

of Bath, England, recorded eight cases, in which, together with

enlargement of the gland, there developed enlargement and palpitation

of the heart, a distinct protrusion of the eyes from their sockets and

an appearance of agitation and distress. Schiff's paper was the first

to throw any light on the subject. But for some reason, probably the

same as in Berthold's forlorn experiments with the sex glands, the

work of a person of no importance was ignored, or perhaps the more

charitable view is that it was forgotten. Yet the tide of observation

kept sweeping in relevant data.

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. Then

Sir William Gull in 1873 painted the singular details of a cretinous

condition developing in adult women, a condition to which another

Englishman, William Ord, of London, five years later donated the title

of myxedema, because of a characteristic thickening and infiltration

of the skin that is one of its features.

Surgery then enters upon the scene. The great Swiss surgeon. Theodore

Kocher, performed the first excision of the thyroid gland in human

beings for goitre, in the same year. In 1882, J.L. Reverdin, another

surgeon of Geneva, noticed that in man complete removal of the thyroid

was followed by symptoms identical with those collected under the name

of myxedema, and used the phrase "operative myxedema" to emphasize

his conviction of the connection between them. Then Schiff, in

1884, neglected twenty-five years, came back, with an array of

demonstrations, proving that the various symptoms, tremors, spasms and

convulsions, following removal of the thyroid, could be prevented by

a previous graft of a piece of the gland under the skin, or by the

injection of thyroid juice into a vein or under the skin, or by the

ingestion of thyroid juice or the raw thyroid by mouth.

A crystallization of ideas about the true function of the thyroid was

now inevitable. In 1884, Sir Victor Horsley produced an experimental

myxedema by removal of the thyroid in monkeys, resembling closely in

its symptom-picture the disease as it occurs in human beings. Möbius,

a German neurologist, came out boldly for the conception that a number

of ailments could be due to qualitative and quantitative changes in

the secretion of the thyroid, and that just as myxedema and cretinism

were due to an insufficiency of the secretion, Parry's disease was

to be ascribed to an excessive outpouring of it. The next steps

were easy. In 1888, Sir Felix Semon, as an outcome of a collective

investigation, established for all time that cretinism, myxedema and

post-operative myxedema were one and the same.

It was bound to occur to someone that if human myxedema and animal

experimental myxedema were one and the same, Schiff's procedure of

prevention and cure by feeding thyroid gland by mouth in the latter

could be applied to the former. The idea occurred to two men, Murray

and Howitz, in 1891. Murray's patient, a Mrs. H., was shown before the

Northcumberland and Durham Medical Society, an English country medical

organization, in February, 1891. She was forty-two years old and had

borne nine children. The illness attacking her had begun insidiously,

with a gradual enlargement and thickening of her face and hands.

She had become very slow in speech and gait, sensitive to cold, and

languid and depressed in spirit to the point of inability to go about

alone. Murray, employing the glycerin extract of the thyroid gland of

a freshly killed sheep, injected twenty-four drops hypodermically,

twice a week. There was an immediate and marvelous improvement, which

continued steadily, Murray finding that it could be maintained by

feeding the gland by mouth. The features and skin returned to the

normal, speech quickened and she became able to walk about and live

her life without hesitation or assistance. She lived to the age of

seventy-four, dying in 1919. In the twenty-eight years, during which

it was always necessary to administer the thyroid, she consumed over

nine pints of thyroid, comprising the glands of 870 sheep.

Giants and dwarfs and fat people have always interested people as

freaks, departures from the usual and the normal, and have formed the

stock of popular museum, circus and country fair. Every mythology has

concerned itself with them. The Titans among the Greeks, Og, Gog

and Magog among the Hebrews, are examples of the fascination of the

superlarge. John Hunter, the founder of experimental surgery, spent a

fortune in chasing after the skeleton of a famous Irish Giant in 1783.

Dwarfs have also fascinated--witness the short-limbed satyrs of the

Greeks and the dwarf gods (Ptah and Bes) of Egypt, as well as the

vogue of the court dwarf-buffoons, of whom Velasquez has left us some

portraits. Fat people, obesity as a manifestation of personality, have

aroused wonder and amusement the world over. The Fat Boy has always

furnished good sport to the Sam Wellers.

All these characters, tall or short, fat or lean, are related to the

activity of a gland of internal secretion in the head, the pituitary,

which became a centre of interest in the late eighties. Because of its

situation, the opinion of the ancients was that it was the source of

the mucus of the nose, an opinion reinforced by the greatest anatomist

of the Dark Ages, Galen, and held up to the seventeenth century. In

other words, it was considered simply a gland of external secretion.

Experimental removal of the pituitary was essayed by Horsley in 1886,

the same man who two years before had reproduced myxedema successfully

in monkeys. Others succeeded his attempt. But the conclusions drawn

were uncertain or contradictory, resulting from the difficulties of

the operative technique of getting at a gland placed at the base

of the brain. Not until 1908 was the problem solved by Paulesco of

Bucharest, who devised a way of reaching it by trepanning the skull.

He was thus able to prove beyond a doubt that the pituitary gland was

essential to life, and that without it no animal could continue to

live for any length of time. Soon after, Harvey Gushing and his

associates at Johns Hopkins Hospital discovered that removal of part

of the gland was followed by a pronounced obesity and sluggishness.

A basis for the understanding of obesity and growth was then

established.

In the eighties, there came to the clinic of Pierre Marie in Paris,

a pupil of the great Charcot, various women complaining of headache.

They also told him about an enlargement of their hands and feet, and

an alarming change in the bones of the face. He differentiated the

affection from its imitators, and created its present designation of

"acromegaly" (enlargement of the extremities). Also he correlated

their relationship to the giants who have been mentioned. Acromegalics

have been also likened to the Neanderthal Man, who had probably, as

the gorillas may have, an excess of the pituitary in their systems.

For four years he studied the morbid phenomena in the tissues of these

sufferers at last consigned to their end. First one, and then another,

and then a third and a fourth exhibited a striking hypertrophy of the

pituitary body and a consequent widening of the portion of the base

of the skull which cradles the gland. He proceeded to say so in

the graduating thesis of his pupil, Souza Leite. The inference

was inevitable that the entire process was to be put down to an

overactivity of the pituitary. Ever since, too, the growth of the

skeleton has been accepted as controlled by that gland.

About this time another set of old observations came to life again,

related to those of Docent Berthold on the auto-grafting of the testes

of a cock, with complete retention of its sexual characters, which he

said, must be due "to the productive action of the testes, i.e., to

its effect upon the blood, and thence to the corresponding effect of

such blood upon the entire organism." Of course, stock raisers and

poultry fanciers have noted the interesting outcome of castration for

about as long as their professions have existed. And for ages the

diminution of sexual activity as a predecessor to the decadence of

senility has been harped upon. Rejuvenation, especially in connection

with sexual activity, as well as with tissue and spiritual elasticity,

has been one of the haunting phantoms of the imagination for as long

as we have records of articulate humanity. Together with El Dorado,

the Elixir of Youth has shared the honors with the Philosopher's

Stone. The idea of employing the chemical materials of the sex glands,

the testes or the ovaries, to bring back youth, to restore juvenility,

had not, as far as we know, occurred to anyone who at any rate put

himself on record, by word or deed, until 1889. The hero of the new

departure was the hero of so many daring adventures among speculative

experiments, Brown-Séquard.

At this time the wanderer was an aged sage, seventy-two years old,

fit, as custom goes, only for retirement and resignation to the fate

of all flesh. The old passion of experimenting upon himself as well as

upon the guinea-pigs, dogs, cats and monkeys, by which he was always

surrounded, was as alive and kicking as ever. I suppose he had been

thinking for years concerning some method for the resumption of youth,

for we find him exclaiming, when the opportunity loomed of a great

laboratory on Agassiz Island, Long Island, on one of his recurrent

flights to New York: "Would that I were thirty!" And other passages in

his personal communications refer again and again to his consciousness

of growing old. The miracles that were being performed by injecting

thyroid and feeding thyroid in animals probably acted as the spark to

an inflammable mass of ideas long smouldering in the subcellars of his

mind. The effects were reported to the Society of Biology in Paris,

one memorable evening, June 1, 1889, in two notes on the results of

the hypodermic injection in man of the testis juice of monkeys and

dogs, and certain generalizations deduced therefrom. Such juices, he

stated, had a definite energy-mobilizing or, as he put it, dynamogenic

action upon the subject himself, stimulating amazingly his general

health, muscular power and mental activity.

These experiments, their nature, the manner in which they were

conducted, the character and age of the experimenter, and the results

claimed, were exquisitely good stuff for ridicule. Cartoonists and

reporters leaped upon the theme with the avidity of the true-blue

interviewer. Paris, where to be ridiculed is to be killed in public

with the most ignominious of deaths, reacted as only the French

temperament can react. The wits of the salons crackled, the

bourgeoisie chortled, the proletariat roared. The Elixir of Life had

been discovered and it was excellent sport.

But Brown-Séquard remained unshaken. He had all the roués of Paris

running to him, and consequent charges of quackery and charlatanism.

How much of these unsavory epithets really applied to him will not be

determined until we have a better acquaintance with his more intimate

life. A biography and collection of his letters is needed. But it is

certain that the general principles he arrived at, aided as much by

the wings of intuition as by the clues of incomplete and incompletely

controlled experiments, survive as the foundations of whatever we know

about the internal secretions, and all our present viewpoints. He

summed these up in 1891 as follows:

"All the tissues, in our view, are modifiers of the blood by means of

an internal secretion taken from them by the venous blood. From this

we are forced to the conclusion that, if subcutaneous injections of

the liquids drawn from these parts are ineffectual, then we should

inject some of the venous blood supplying these parts.... We admit

that each tissue, and, more generally, each cell of the organism,

secretes on its own account, certain products or special ferments,

which, through this medium (the blood), influence all other cells of

the body, a definite solidarity being thus established among all the

cells through a mechanism other than the nervous system.... All

the tissues (glands and other organs) have thus a special internal

secretion, and so give to the blood something more than the waste

products of metabolism. The internal secretions, whether by direct

favorable influence, or whether through the obstacles they oppose to

deleterious processes, seem to be of great utility in maintaining the

organism in its normal state."

The only part of this statement not conceded today is that relating to

the formation of internal secretions by tissues other than those of

which the cells are definitely glandular, that is secretory: as can be

determined under the microscope. Brown-Séquard added to the concept

of internal secretions, fathered by Claude Bernard, the idea of a

correlation, a mutual influencing of them and of the different organs

of the body through them. The nervous system had hitherto been

regarded as the sole means of communication between cells, by its

telegraphic arrangements of nerve filaments reaching out everywhere,

interweaving with each other and the cells. The Brown-Séquard

conception inferred the existence of a postal system between cells,

the blood supplying the highway for travel and transmission of the

post, the post consisting of the chemical substances secreted by

the glands. To be sure, the doctrine was only an inference, though

well-founded, of which the direct experimental proof was not to

be obtained until the researches of Bayliss and Starling. Yet to

Brown-Séquard belongs the immortal credit, if not of the originator,

at any rate of the resurrector of the idea of using gland extracts to

influence the body. The unwarranted hopes aroused by his enthusiastic

reports of rejuvenating miracles have long since been dissipated.

Moreover, they smeared the whole subject with a disrepute which clings

to certain narrow and unreasonable minds to this day. But as every

physiologist since has acknowledged, he was and remains the great

path-breaker in the conquest of the internal secretions.

THE HORMONES

The problem of the internal secretions was now attacked from another

angle. A great Russian physiologist, Pawlow, called attention to the

fact that the introduction of a dilute mineral acid, such as the

hydrochloric acid, normally a constituent of the stomach digestive

fluid, into the upper part of the intestine, provoked a secretion

of the pancreas, which is so important for intestinal digestion. He

explained the phenomenon as a reflex, a matter of the nerves going

from the intestine to the pancreas.

His pupil, Popielski, threw doubt upon so easy an explanation, by

proving that the same reaction could be elicited even after all the

nerve connections between the gut and the spinal cord were severed. If

the relation was a reflex, it would have to be classed now as one of

those local nerve circuits, which are pretty common among the viscera,

a local call and reply as it were, without mediation of the great long

distance trunk lines in the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata.

The work of Bayliss and Starling, two English physiologists, was

commenced then to test the hypothesis. They soon found that the

experiment could be so devised as to exclude any influence whatever on

the part of the nervous tissues, and yet result positively. Thus, if a

loop of intestine was so prepared as to be attached to the rest of the

body only by means of its blood vessels, all the nerves being cut,

putting some acid into it was still followed by a flow of pancreatic

juice, no less marked than when none of the parts about the piece

of gut had been disturbed. It was evident that the stimulus to the

pancreas was carried by way of the blood stream. That the stimulating

substance was not the acid itself, was shown by the failure of the

reaction to occur when the acid was injected directly into the blood

stream. Since there was this difference in the effects between acid in

the intestine and acid in the blood, it was manifest that the active

substance must be some material elaborated in the intestinal mucous

membrane under the influence of the acid. So they scraped some of the

lining of the bowel, rubbed it up with acid, and injected the filtered

mixture into the blood. They were rewarded by a flow of pancreatic

juice greater in amount than any obtained in their other experiments.

From the filtered mixture they isolated in an impure form, a solid

substance which, when introduced into the circulation, has a similar

action. To this, of which the exact chemical make-up is as yet an

unknown, they gave the name secretin.

Secretin and its properties they used to generalize as a perfectly

direct and amply demonstrable example of an internal secretion.

Metaphors are no less valuable in physiology than in poetry. They

declared that the internal secretions appeared to them to be chemical

messengers, telegraph boys sent from one organ to another through the

public highways, the blood (really more like a moving platform). So

they christened them all hormones, deriving the word from the Greek

verb meaning to rouse or set in motion. As a science is a well-made

language, a new word is an event. It sums up details, economizes

brain-work and so is cherished by the intellect. The study of the

internal secretions has advanced by leaps and bounds since it became

convenient to speak of them as hormones. Withal, the brilliant work of

Bayliss and Starling stands as the third great foundation stone,

the first Claude Bernard's and the second Brown-Séquard's, in the

architecture of the modern concepts of the internal secretions.