THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION
The ubiquitous and deep-seated influence of the internal secretions
upon life and personality comprises but a fraction of what is known,
and only a hint of what is to become known. There is an endocrine
aspect to every human being and every human activity, normal and
abnormal, internal process and its external expression, regulated
by laws of which we are beginning to catch a glimpse. Their control
promises us now a dominion over the most intimate and inaccessible
recesses of our lives in a way comparable only to the control we now
exercise over the forces and energies once revered as the instruments
of the gods--light, heat, magnetism, electricity. We have learned how
to control and change our environment. We are now learning, endocrine
research is now discovering, how to control and change ourselves.
The story of the evolution of the two types of control has many
analogies. When man ceased looking upon his surroundings as inhabited
by spirits of good and evil, as he conceived himself, and discovered
that they were composed of things malleable and analysable in his
hands, he became their master. When now he drops the old superstitions
about himself as a spirit, an emulsion of a spirit of good and spirit
of evil, and sees himself more and more clearly as the most complex
of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple
and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and
modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will
ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it
behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present
knowledge might be put.
Since every step of the daily routine or adventure, from waking to
sleeping, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, working,
idling, fighting, playing, feeling, enjoying, sorrowing, every shade
of emotion and nuance of mood, in short every phase of happiness
and unhappiness, are endocrine episodes in the life history of the
individual, the sphere of applications is as long and broad and deep
as life itself. Not only do the internal secretions open up before us
the great hope--that Life at last will cease to stumble and grope and
blunder, manacled by the iron chains of inexorable cause and effect.
They provide tools, concrete and measurable, that can be handled and
moved, weighed and seen, for the management of the problems of human
nature and evolution.
Every department of human life, the questions of labor and industry,
science and art, education, puericulture, international problems,
crime and disease, may be illuminated. War and Sex, those two master
interests of mankind, may be understood and handled sympathetically
as they have never before. The reactions of man alone, and man in the
crowd, will be clarified. The red thread of individuality which runs
through the woof and warp of all human affairs will be unraveled.
Inevitably, customs, morals, codes of procedure and practice,
institutions, all those expressions of opinion which make conduct,
all the currents which contrive the infinite variety of life, will be
transmitted into another set of values.
A remoulding, a remodeling will take place all along the line.
Manifestly an unstable thymocentric should not be treated as a
criminal, but treated in a sanitarium. A masculinoid woman needs
satisfactions not vouchsafed in the old "love, honor and obey" home.
How absurd it is to found codes of morality upon sermons or even the
latest psychologies. During the nineteenth century progress in physics
and mechanics overturned traditions thousands of years had painfully
toiled to erect. What is to happen when man comes at last to
experiment upon himself like a god, dealing not only with the
materials without, but also with the very constituents of his
innermost being? Will he not then indeed become a god? If he does not
destroy himself before, that is surely his destiny. For better or for
worse, we possess now in the endocrines new instruments for swaying
the individual as individual, and as related to other individuals, as
a member of a type, family, nation, species and genus.
THE BASIS OF VARIATION
The sense of likeness and the sense of unlikeness plays a decisive
rôle in the diurnal schedule of the individual. His sense of
resemblance to his father and mother, his kin and clan, mark him and
them off against the cosmos as an alliance of defense and offense. Yet
no matter how closely he is like them and they like him, he differs
and varies, they differ and vary, with a sort of mutual forgiveness,
because the amount of resemblance overtops the degree of variation. In
a paper on the "Rediscovery of the Unique," H.G. Wells emphasized the
unique quality of the individual, and how, in spite of the cleverest
devices of classification, living things ultimately escaped the
classifying net by virtue of their tendency forever to vary.
The individual is unique. Yet when all is said and done, the fact
remains that between individuals there is resemblance, and among them
variation. What is the reason for their resemblances and what is the
cause of their variation?
The conception of a particular chemical make-up of the individual,
statable and relatively controllable in terms of the internal
secretions, supplies a more rational and satisfactory method
of approach to the problem than any so far suggested as far as
vertebrates are concerned at any rate. In effect, the differences
between individuals may fundamentally thus be grouped among the
differences which distinguish other chemical substances. The
difference between water, technically known as hydrogen monoxide,
and the antiseptic fluid labeled hydrogen dioxide lies wholly in the
possession by the latter of an extra atom of oxygen in its molecules.
All the peculiarities and qualities by which hydrogen peroxide is
separated from water are referred to that additional quantum of
oxygen. So the diversity of constitution and appearance of two
brothers, alike in that they have inherited the same internal
secretion trends, may be traced to the superiority of the pituitary of
the one over the other.
Variation and resemblance are large issues, crucial material of the
science of biology upon which much has been thought and written. That
the proportion of the endocrines determines variation and resemblance,
heredity and evolution is a hypothesis advanced, supported by a large
amount of facts, and capable of the most interesting experimental
verification and observation. If a child resembles particularly either
of its parents, grandparents or relatives, there is good reason for
believing that it is because their endocrine formulas are very much
alike. When people apparently not blood-related at all resemble
one other, the same law must hold. Resemblances may be partial or
complete, and the degree will depend upon the amount and ratio of the
internal secretions involved.
The same endocrine constitutions will produce corresponding physiques,
physiognomies, abilities and characters. Deviations in endocrine type
from that of the original stock, more of one endocrine and less of
another, is at the bottom of the phenomenon of variation, basic for
the origin of new species as well as the extinction of the old. In
short, viewing the internal secretions as determinants, by their
quantitative variations, of a host of biologic phenomena furnishes a
concrete and detailed foundation for Darwin's theory of pangenesis.
INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS
Darwin's theory of pangenesis was an attempt to harmonize everything
known in his time about heredity. It supposed that the various
organs of the body gave off into the blood substances, themselves
in miniature, which were taken up by the sex cells, and so became
responsible for the development of their mother-organ in the newly
forming individual. Modern knowledge cannot accept all this as a
whole. But in a modified version, it has become the germ of a theory
of heredity of which J.T. Cunningham, of Oxford, is the chief backer.
Beginning with the traits and qualities which distinguish the sexes,
grouped as the secondary sex characters, he showed that they are
correlated with the special sexual function of the species in which
they occur. These traits appear only when the hormones occur which
are present in one sex and that only when the gonads of that sex are
mature. In some cases they appear only at the period of the year
when reproduction takes place, disappearing again after the breeding
season. Their presence makes certain cells develop in excessive
numbers at a particular spot in the organism (as in the growth of
breasts from a few sweat glands) or causes them to specialize (to make
hair on the face in man, or to grow antlers on the head of a stag).
After castration, the hormones being absent, all these points of
contrast between the sexes fail to appear. So by analogy we may
explain all somatic and psychic differentiation as functions of the
glands of internal secretion. Contemplated from the angle of the
effect of environment upon the endocrines, and a reflected action
upon the germ cells, we may outline a mechanism of the inheritance of
acquired characters at certain times and consequent adaptation. The
cycle of events would be as follows:
1. A state of lability of cells at a point because of increased or
decreased use.
2. An increased or decreased appropriation by them of the hormone
controlling their function.
3. A corresponding increase or decrease in function of the gland of
internal secretion and so,
4. An increased or decreased representation of it in the reproductive
sex cells in the gonads.
To take a classic illustration, the long neck of the giraffe. The neck
of certain animals living in a district populated by trees with high
branches would be in state of instability. If at the same time the
pituitary, for some reason, was unstable and reacted with an extra
supply of its secretion, it would stimulate the neck cells to
reproduce themselves. In turn the pituitary would become stabilized
in the direction of increased secretion, and hand on the component of
increased secretion to the sex cells. That component, in conjunction
with other factors, would therefore determine the emergence of a
definite species character. In other words, the glands of internal
secretion, as intermediaries between the environment and body, and
between the body and the reproductive sex cells or germplasm, tender
the clue to a phase of the puzzle of heredity, adaptation and
evolution. It is only a dotted outline of an explanation to be sure,
but one certainly capable of being filled in.
THE BEARING ON BREEDING
Since the endocrine glands are so subtly sensitive and responsive to
environment, and are at the same time so intimately concerned in the
process of inheritance--a law which sums up their influence upon
resemblance and variation in animals--there is no need to stress
their importance for the practical science and art of good breeding,
eugenics. Another mode of approach to its problems is opened up, and
fresh enthusiasm instilled into its hopes and aspirations. A method
of analysis of the factors involved, together with rules for the
prediction of the outcome of certain matings, when finally worked out,
will elevate its procedure to the level of the more exact sciences.
A man's chief gift to his children is his internal secretion
composition. The endocrines are truly the matter of breeding as
they are of growth. They are the material carriers of the inherited
physical and psychic dispositions, powers, abilities and disabilities
from the soma to the germplasm and back from the germplasm to the
soma. All kinds of questions arise as soon as one attempts to consider
the bearing of this underlying principle upon concrete situations.
What happens, say, when a pituitocentric mates with a thyrocentric?
Or when a pituitocentric marries a pituitocentric? Is there a
reinforcement or a cancellation of the dominant endocrine? Is there
a quantitative addition of internal glandular tendencies in the
germplasm, or a more complex rearrangement dependent upon reactions
between all the internal secretions?
The term endocrine dominants brings up the inquiries of Mendelism, and
the relation of Mendelian conceptions of dominant and recessive to the
internal secretions. The Mendelians have emphasized the rôle of the
unit factor in heredity, and the conservation of the unit factor as
an entity through all the adventures of matings. Also, that when unit
factors, say of the color of the eyes, come into conflict, brown or
black being mixed with blue or grey, one, the recessive, is submerged
and overlaid but not destroyed by the other, the dominant. So brown or
black eyes, dark hair, curly hair, dark skin, and so on, are dominant,
while blue or grey eyes, light or straight hair, light skin are
recessives. A nervous temperament is dominant to the phlegmatic. A
number of psychic qualities have been declared to be Mendelian unit
factors: memory, mechanical instinct, mathematical ability, literary
ability, musical ability, and even handwriting.
As architects of human qualities the endocrines must be involved
in the Mendelian unit factors. Moreover, they seem to act upon a
particular locale in different degrees, which is the strongest
argument against the resolution of a number of structural traits into
Mendelian unit characters. Most characters, somatic or psychic, are
the products not of the action of one internal secretion alone, but of
the interlinked activities of all of them. The amount of fat deposited
under the skin, for instance, is influenced by the pituitary, the
thyroid, the pancreas, the liver, the adrenals and the sex glands.
Other qualities, likewise, are resultants of a compromise between all
the endocrine factors comprising the equation of the individual. If
we are to look for unit factors at all in endocrine heredity, we must
look more deeply into constitution, and measure the hormone potentials
and their mobilization or suppression.
It will, in all probability, be found that the stability or
instability of an endocrine will have a good deal to do with the part
played by it in inheritance as well as in the life of the individual
An unstable pituitocentric marrying another unstable pituitocentric
will have children either exceptionally small or tall, or abnormally
bright or stupid. The instability tends to right itself in the next
generation, or that following. Genius as a sport, as well as sudden
degeneration of family stock, the whole problem of mutation, may be
closely connected with this tendency.
It has been noted that the extinction of species has been preceded by
a great increase in their size, for example, the case of the great
reptilia of prehistoric time. That possibly represented pituitary
stabilization, and so an abeyance of the ability to vary, necessary
for fresh adaptation to a changing environment. Indeed, endocrine
instability appears the fundamental condition of the tendency to vary,
endocrine stability the opposite.
Certain endocrine facts in relation to heredity should be mentioned.
The daughters of mothers who menstruated early, themselves menstruate
early. Animals fed upon thyroid during pregnancy, comparable to the
thyrocentric, give birth to offspring with a very large thymus,
comparable to the thymocentric. Women with partial thyroid deficiency,
or myxedema, bear cretins. These are suggestive of what the internal
secretions may do to an individual in inheritance and development.
Inherited endocrine potential is the maximum reaction of which a gland
is capable. This matter of potential is comparable to the factor of
reserve power or margin of safety demonstrated up to the hilt for
such organs as the heart and kidney as varying from individual to
individual. A low potential, like instability of an internal secretion
gland, may be latent, and not made manifest until the proper stimulus,
the maximum amount of stress and strain, like accident, disease, shock
or war, arrives.
When the individual is tested the effects may be purely local because
there is always in the organism a point of least resistance. Physical
changes alone may be prominent. Or because somatic changes are minor,
the psychic will dominate the picture. An attack of the "blues,"
unaccompanied by any demonstrable transformation of the bodily
processes, may be the sole symptom of an endocrine failure somewhere
in the chain due to hereditary weakness or low potential.
So we may account for family trends and streaks, for varieties
and strains among individuals, upon more precise lines based upon
endocrine analysis. Family disturbances of the internal secretions of
the extreme sort denominated disease are well known. Indeed, a number
of family diseases or predispositions to diseases, have been traced
to them. Predisposition in any direction will probably be shown to be
caused by them, within limits. Research here has its opportunity.
THE IMPROVEMENT OF RACIAL STOCK
A vast new territory of inquiry and achievement, as yet totally
unexplored, is opened by the endocrines to the eugenists, and those
idealists whose most earnest aspiration is the improvement of racial
stock as a necessary preliminary to improvement of racial life.
Beginning with Galton, they have brought to light a great collection
of data to prove that human traits and faculties, good and bad, are
inherited. Ability has been shown to run in certain families and
degeneracy in others. Yet all of the practical net result has been
summed up in the term "negative eugenics," the eugenics of prohibition
and warning.
Now the concept of personality, as woven around a system of chemical
reflexes, handed on from generation to generation, is bound to change
all that, and to create a structure of positive eugenics. It has been
said that what radium is to chemistry, the internal secretions are to
physiology. Just as radium enlightens the chemist about the history of
matter, and the integrations and disintegrations constituting the life
of an element--the internal secretions illuminate the history of the
individual as part of the life of the race, and of its integrations
and disintegrations. Seeing the individual as a system of chemical
substances interacting will assist enormously to predict the nature,
character and constitution of his descendants, which is essentially
what the eugenist is after.
The study of matings, the heart of the matter, will concern itself
with the investigation and comparison of the kind of endocrine
personalities that mate, the internal secretion predominances that
cross, and the consequent endocrine personality of the offspring.
Data bearing upon physique and physiognomy, details of anatomy and
function, mind and behaviour will so be co-ordinated as no eugenist
has hitherto succeeded in doing. Laws of endocrine inheritance will
emerge that will bring the control of heredity within measurable
distance. Standards and norms of a new kind would be obtained.
A beginning of this study of endocrine inheritance, on the pathologic
side, has been made. Some of these have been along Mendelian lines.
Following up abnormal growth (making giants and dwarfs) and abnormal
metabolism (goitre, diabetes, and so on), it has been stated that it
would seem that abnormal growth is dominant in the male, and recessive
in the female, while abnormal metabolism is dominant in the female and
recessive in the male. If an endocrine abnormality like a goitre,
or cretinism, or a dwarf or giant appear in a family as a sign of
endocrine instability, other members of that family will very likely
show internal secretion abnormalities.
If one gland of internal secretion acts as the centre of the system
and the others as satellites, we should be able to trace what happens
to it in the different generations. Does it maintain its supremacy? Or
will it be ousted by another member of the group? The time will come
when we shall thus be able to advise prospective parents of the
consequences of procreation and to forecast the meaning for the race
of a particular marriage. Internal glandular analysis may become
legally compulsory for those about to mate before the end of the
present century.
What are desirable and undesirable matings? The general law followed
by nature in her helterskelter way seems to be the production of the
greatest number of hybrids and variations possible, whether for
good or evil does not matter. Certain endocrine types appear to be
specially attracted to others belonging to the same group. Thus
thymus-centered types frequently marry. The ante-pituitary type of
male, the strongly masculine, mates often with the post-pituitary type
of female, the markedly feminine. The children exhibit the lineaments
of the pituitary-centered type. The general trend seems to be the
establishment of a better balanced, equilibrated type. Yet the
children often are apt to segregate into pituitary dominants or
pituitary deficients. Happiness and unhappiness in marriage should
be examined from the standpoint of endocrine compatibility or
incompatibility. Likewise those divorced or about to be divorced.
The correction of endocrine defects, disturbances, imbalances and
instabilities, before mating, presents another field. It remains to be
seen whether we shall thereby, in one generation, be able to affect
at all the germplasm, hitherto revered by all pious biologists as an
environment-proof holy of holies. No one can deny, in the face of the
multitude of evidence available, that internal secretion disturbances
occur in the mother, which, when grave, offer in the infant gross
proof of their significance, and therefore when slight must more
subtly work upon it. Endocrine disturbances in infancy have been
traced to endocrine disturbances in the mother during pregnancy.
Pregnant animals fed on thyroid give birth to young with large thymus
glands. The diet of the mother has been proved conclusively to
influence the development and constitution of the child. As the
internal secretions influence the history of the food in the body,
they affect development in the womb indirectly as well as directly.
Certainly, whether or no we learn how to change the nature of
germplasm within a short time, we have in the endocrines the means at
hand for affecting _the whole individual that is born and sees the
light of day_.
THE CONTROL OF MUTATIONS
The true physical and intellectual evolution of man depends upon the
production of mutations of a desirable kind that can survive. The
information furnished by the study of the endocrines concerning
the genesis of personality provides the foundations for a positive
eugenics, a eugenics of the encouragement of desirable matings, with
the proper legal and social procedures. Selective breeding for the
production of the best endocrine types should become practicable.
But the biologist should be able to go farther. If the eugenist is to
limit himself to the method of the animal breeder he will have to rest
satisfied with the characters or hereditary factors given, that turn
up spontaneously in an individual. But with the internal secretions
as the controllable controllers of mutations, the outlook changes.
It should become possible to produce new mutations, good and bad, to
speed up their production at any rate. The feeding of thyroid to
a gifted father before procreation might enhance immeasurably the
chances of transmission of his gift as well as of its intensification
in his offspring. A field of investigation is opened that would
embrace in due time the deliberate control of human evolution.
All the physical traits, stature, color, muscle function, and so on,
offer themselves for improvement, as well as brain size, and the
intellectual and emotional factors which have dominated man's social
evolution. The general prevalence of nervous disorders in civilized
countries, visible even in the nervous infants the specialist in
children's diseases is called upon to treat, shows that the nervous
system of the better part of mankind is in a state of unstable
equilibrium. It may be another example of the curious coincidences
that have been called the Fitness of the Environment that the
investigation of the endocrines promises to put into our hands the
instruments of the control of the future of the nervous system. In
general, meanwhile, the eugenist should strive for raising the level
of the endocrine potential, and discourage its lowering. That means
the encouragement of matings in which all the internal secretion
activities are reinforced. On the other hand, those internal secretion
combinations, generally leading to a deficiency of all of them which
produce types of mental defectives, delinquency and crime should not
be allowed to occur.
THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRONMENT
What suggestions now are there for the euthenist who would control
the influence of environment upon child culture. There are certain
pertinent facts and leads that are worth considering.
In analyzing environment, one must distinguish sharply in the jungle,
the non-living factors from the living. For while the nonliving act
upon the endocrines directly, the living act upon the vegetative
system, as a whole. The non-living factors are those with the intimate
scrutiny of which physics and chemistry have busied themselves: food,
water, air, light, heat, electricity, magnetism. The living are the
animals that prowl all over the planet, the predatories spreading the
gospel of fear.
The dietetic habits of a person, for instance, are known to have an
influence upon the glands of internal secretion. Meat-eating produces
a greater call upon the thyroid than any other form of food. In time
this ought to produce a degree of hyperthyroidism in the carniverous
populations. Pre-war statistics concerning meat-eating in different
countries show the greatest meat-eating among the English-speaking
groups, who all in all must be admitted the most energetic.
_Meat per Day per_
_Countries_ _Capita in Grams_
Australia 306
U.S. of America 149
Great Britain 130
France 92
Belgium and Holland 86
Austria-Hungary 79
Russia 59
Spain 61
Italy 29
Japan 25
Sea-water contains iodine. People living in contact with sea-water
would be apt to get more iodine in their systems, and so a greater
degree of thyroid activity. On the other hand, certain bodies and
sources of inland water hold something deleterious to the thyroid, so
that whole populations in Europe, Asia and America drinking such water
have become goitrous and cretinous, and a large percentage straight
imbeciles. Endemic cretinism is the name given to the condition. In
parts of Switzerland, Savoy, Tyrol and the Pyrenees, in America
around some of the Great Lakes, there are still such foci. Marco Polo
described similar areas he encountered in his travels through Asia.
Certain foods with aphrodisiac qualities may act by stimulating the
internal secretion of the sex glands. A type of pituitocentric has an
almost uncontrollable craving for sweets. Alcohol and the endocrines
remain to be studied.
Light, heat and humidity stand in some special relation to the
adrenals. Pigment deposit in the skin as protection against light
is controlled by the adrenal cortex. The reaction of the skin blood
vessels to heat and humidity is regulated by the adrenal medulla. A
change in the adrenal as a response to changes of temperature and
humidity in an environment would result in a number of concomitant
transformations throughout the body. So variation and adaptation are
probably connected. Most Europeans living for a sufficiently long time
in the tropics suffer from a combination of symptoms spoken of as
"Punjab head" or "Bengal head." The condition is probably the result
of excessive adrenal stimulation by the excessive heat and light of
the tropical sun, followed by a reaction of exhaustion and failure,
with the consequent phenomena of a form of neurasthenia. In the
section on the pineal gland there was mentioned the relation between
light and the pineal gland in growing animals, and how it serves to
keep in check the sex-stimulating action of light. The earlier puberty
and menstruation of the warmer climates may be explained as due to an
earlier regression of the pineal under the pressure of a great amount
of light playing upon the skin.
All these, and many more could be cited, are instances of the direct
influence of environmental factors upon one or more of the endocrines,
and so upon the organism as a whole. Indeed, stimuli may be considered
to modify an organism only in so far as they modify the glands of
internal secretion. Consequently, climatic factors will tend to make a
population possess certain points of resemblance in common.
Varieties of the human race exist as do varieties of dogs. The
pekingese and the fox terrier are as different as the Slav and Latin
are different: because of differences in internal secretion make-up.
The Slav peasant is definitely subthyroid in his general effect:
round head, coarse features, stubby hands, and his stolid, brooding
intellectual and emotional reaction. The Latin shows a pronounced
adrenal streak in his coloration, his emotivity, his susceptibility to
neurosis and psychosis. H. Laing Gordon, a Scot physician, reported
that of 700 cases he studied, more than twice as many of duplex eyed
individuals (brown or black, i.e., adrenal-centered most often), were
susceptible to the mental disturbances of war as the simplex (blue or
gray-eyed, i.e., thyroid-centered most often). He also pointed out
that such individuals tend to have a narrow and abnormally arched
palate. The Anglo-Saxon tends to be more sharply pituitarized, his
features are more clean-cut, his mentality more stable. The Frenchman
is rather a cross between the Anglo-Saxon pituitary-centered and the
Italian or Spanish adrenal-centered.
So national resemblances, traceable to climatic influences being
repeated from generation to generation upon the endocrines, may be
explained physiologically. The physiologic interpretation of history
will indeed be found the broadest, including as complementary Buckle's
climatic theory, Hegel's ideas on the influence of ideas, and Marx's
on the superiority of the economic motives and forces.
THE RACES OF MANKIND
Arthur Keith, conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of
Surgeons of England, was the first to apply the principle of endocrine
differentiation to the problem of the color-lines--the lines which
have divided mankind crudely into the yellow, the red, the white and
the brown, the Negro, the Mongol, the Caucasian, the copper tinted
American. It has long been recognized by anthropologists that the
differences of color march with differences in every comparable trait.
Thus the ideal Negro is built upon a pattern in which all the elements
are specific and singular. When the looms revolve that make him,
there is produced a gleaming black skin, kinky black hair, squat
wide-nostriled nose, thick protruding lips, large striking teeth,
prominent jaws, and staring eyes. As his upright carriage and
bone-muscle-fat proportions are distinctive, so are his musical voice
and his easily wrought upon nerves. In contrast the Caucasian has a
good deal of hair on his body, his skin is a pale tan-pink, his lips
are thin, and his nose especially has the definite bridge which
narrows it. The Mongol, like the Negro, has the hairless body and the
beardless face, but unlike him has lank straight hair on his head,
while his features are flattened and fore-shortened.
Upon the basis of these structural, functional and mental differences,
the qualitative and quantitative evolution of which in the race as in
the individual is guided by the glands of internal secretion, Keith
presents a very good case for the view that the white man is an
example of relative excess of the pituitary, thyroid, adrenal and
gonad endocrines. "The sharp and pronounced nasalization of the
face, the tendency to strong eyebrow ridges, the prominent chin, the
tendency to bulk of body, and height of stature in the majority of
Europeans" are the signs of pituitary dominance. Keith is also of the
opinion that "the sexual differentiation, the robust manifestations of
the male characters, is more emphatic in the Caucasian than in
either the Mongol or Negro racial types ... in certain negro types,
especially in Nilotic tribes, with their long stork-like legs, we seem
to have a manifestation of abeyance in the action of the interstitial
glands." As for the adrenal superiority of the white man, "it is 150
years since John Hunter came to the conclusion ... that the original
color of man's skin was black, and all the knowledge that we have
gathered since his supports the inference he drew. From the fact that
pigment begins to collect and thus darken the skin when the adrenal
bodies become the seat of a destructive disease we infer that they
have to do with the clearing away of pigment, and that we Europeans
owe the fairness of our skins to some particular virtue resident in
the adrenal bodies." Finally, as regards the thyroid, a comparison of
the face of a cretin with that of the Negro or Mongol tells the story.
A certain variety of idiocy, Mongolian idiocy, in which the face
simulates cretinism so closely as to deceive practised clinical
observers, is characterized by a Chinese cast of the features and
eyes, hence the name. And in the Bushman of South Africa, the cretin's
face is even more startlingly recalled.
There is every reason then for believing that the white man possesses
more of pituitary, adrenal, gonad, and thyroid internal secretions as
compared with the yellow man or black man. And since these endocrines
control not only physique and physiognomy, anatomic and functional
minutiae, but also mind and behaviour, we are justified in putting
down the white man's predominance on the planet to a greater
all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones.
While the Negro is relatively subadrenal, the Mongol is relatively
subthyroid. Their relative deficiency in internal secretions
constitutes the essence of the White Man's Burden.
MAN'S ATTITUDE TOWARD HIMSELF
A last, but by no means least, application we may consider of the
developing knowledge of the internal secretions in relation to human
evolution is its effect upon Man's attitude toward himself and so
toward his fellow men. Whatever else he is, man is a land animal with
ideas. That makes him a thought-adventurer among materials. In a word,
he is the last word of mind working upon matter. But persistently he
has refused to recognize himself as matter and as subject to the laws,
to the physics and chemistry of matter.
History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of the
interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of man in
time and space. Materials and ideas have reacted, the record shows;
materials come upon have begotten strange fantasies. Ideas that
flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have transformed utterly the
face of the earth. The herd-brute, agglutinated with his fellows by a
magnetism beyond his ken, could be infected with thought, and so cast
in the heroic mould. The possibility of communion,--that possibility
of possibilities, for without it none other could be possible--has
rendered man the heir of a divine destiny. For the progressive
education of the race, a single discoverer here, an inventor there,
and thinkers everywhere have been inspired. In due time their
inspiration becomes the possession of even the lowest brain but
capable of grasping it.
Man's attitude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his
attitude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and
evolved with his education about himself. According to the theory he
formulated concerning his being, his why and wherefore, he directed
and governed, punished and mutilated himself and them. But the
pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable quality of the truth
would not let him stand still. The poetic genius within him, as Blake
called it, struggled on from one dogma concerning his nature to
another. Behaviour malignant or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy
and pitiable in its comedy, flowed inevitably on. Witchcraft trials
and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition belong among the more
mentionable consequences of some of man's theories about his own
nature and its requirements.
Heretofore the imaginative spirit has had its day in the matter. And,
curiously enough, an obsession to subjugate the natural has made it
exalt the supernatural. Visions, dreams, portents, revelations, all
symptomatic of an order of things above nature, are the stuff of what
more than ninety-nine per cent of the millions of the race believe
about themselves and their fate. Man's cruelty to man, through the
ages, is a comment upon how vast and ramifying may be the consequences
of a delusion.
But now for a couple of centuries the critical spirit, which is the
spirit of science, has been invading the affairs of men. Humble but
persistent corrosive of delusion, it has infiltrated the furthest
bounds of ignorance and superstition. It has not dared to assert the
supremacy of its fundamental views upon the everyday problems of human
life because it was without concrete means of vindicating its claims.
That lack is now supplied by the growing understanding of the chemical
factors as the controllers and dictators of all the legion aspects of
life.
The profoundest achievement of the physiologist will be the change his
teachings and discoveries will bring about in man's attitude toward
himself. When he comes to realize himself as a chemical machine that
can, within limits, be remodeled, overhauled and repaired, as an
automobile can be, within limits, when he becomes saturated with the
significance of his endocrine-vegetative system at every turn and move
of his life, and when sympathy and pity informed by knowledge and
understanding will come to regulate his relationships with the lowest
and most despised of the men, women and children about him, the era of
the first real civilization will properly be said to be born.
Morality, as society's code of conduct for its members, will have
to change in the direction of a greater flexibility with the
establishment of organic differences in human types. There is nothing
that is more emphasized to the pathologist than that one man's meat is
another man's poison. In the family, as nature's laboratory for
the manufacture of fresh combinations of the internal secretions,
allowances will be made for divergences in capacity and deportment
from a new angle altogether. Schools will function as the developers,
stimulators and inhibitors of the endocrines, as well as investigators
of the individuals who have not enough or too much of one or some of
them. Prisons will have the same function, only they will be named
detention hospitals. The raising of the general level of intelligence
by the judicious use of endocrine extracts will mean a good deal to
the sincere statesman. The average duration of life will be prolonged
for an enormous mass of the population. If the prevention of war
depends upon the burning into the imagination of the electorates
what the consequences of war are, a high intelligence quotient and
revaluation of life will count for a good deal.
Man is the animal that wants Utopia. So long as human nature was
looked upon as fixed constant in the ebb and flow of life, a Utopia of
fine minds could be conceived only by the dreamer and poet. The desire
for such a Utopia could only be regarded as a tragic aspiration for an
impossibility. The physiology of the internal secretions teaches that
human nature does change and can be changed. A relative control of its
properties is already in view. The absolute control will come.
Nor need anyone fear that the science of the internal secretions in
its maturity will signify the abolition of the marvelous differences
between human beings that create the unique personalities of history.
A derangement of the endocrines has been responsible for masterpieces
of the human species in the past and will be responsible for them in
the future. The equality of Utopia can be the equality of the highest
and fullest development possible for each of its inhabitants. The
applications of endocrine control will not necessarily interfere
with the life of the individual. There will be breeding of the best
mixtures of glands of internal secretion possible. And there will
be treatment for those born with a handicap, or who have become
handicapped in the life struggle. There will be a stimulation of
capacity to the limit. But beyond that, compulsory equalization is a
theorist's bogey.
The internal secretions are the most hopeful and promising of the
reagents for control yet come upon by the human mind. They open up
limitless prospects for the improvement of the race. A few hundreds of
investigators are engaged upon their study throughout the world. That
is one of the ironies of our contemporary civilization. A concerted
effort at the task of understanding them, backed by the labors of tens
of thousands of workers, would, without a doubt, accomplish as much
for humanity as the vast armies and navies that consume the substance
of mankind. If we could not obtain Utopia then, we might, at least by
abolishing the subnormals and abnormals who constitute the slaves and
careerists of society, render the human race less contemptible and
more divine.
INDEX
Ability, natural
Acquired characters, inheritance of
Acromegaly
Addison
Addison's disease
Adolescence, period of
Adrenal glands
and anger
and courage
and emergencies
and emotions
and fatigue
and fear
and neuroses
and pseudo-hermaphroditism
and puberty
blood pressure and
brain cells and
chromaffin cells of
cortex of
excess of secretion
failure of secretion
function of
glands of combat and fight
hair and
influence of in hermaphroditism
insufficiency of secretion
medulla of
pigment cells and
relation to pineal gland
relation to pituitary
secretion of
sexuality and
skin and
Adrenal-centered type
Adrenal face
Adrenal personalities, or types
compensated
insufficient
in pregnancy
of brain work
of girl
of hair
of skin
of teeth
Adrenal personalities, or types of women
reactions to modernism in
Adrenalin
Alcoholism and endocrine types
Analysis, endocrine
Anger
and adrenals
Antagonisms
Anti-Fate
Antitoxic function of thyroid gland
Ape-parvenu, the
Applications of endocrinology
Autonomic system
Backgrounds of personality
Baldness and the thyroid
Baumann
Bayliss
Beard
Beard's neurasthenia
von Bechterew
Behavior
Bell, Blair
Bernard, Claude
Berthold
Black races, endocrine control in
Blood pressure, and adrenals
Body, influence of glands upon
Body-mind complex
Bones
long, development of
Bordeau
Bossi
Brain cells and adrenals
Brain, growth of
Brainwork, adrenal type of
Breakdown, nervous
Breeding, bearing of endocrine glands on
Brown-Séquard
Caesar, Julius, an epileptic
pituitary in
Capacity
Careerist
as abnormals
feminine
instincts of
masculine
super-
Carlson
Castration
effects of
effects of, on thymus
Character
Charcot
Charging of wishes, endocrine
Check and drive system
Chemistry of the soul
Child--bearing, transfigurations of
Childhood, epoch of the pineal
Chromaffin cells of adrenals
Chromosomes
Climacteric
Color, endocrine control of, in races
Combat, adrenals and
Combinations of types of personality
Conduct
Constitutions, endocrine
Cooperation
Corpus luteum
and mammary glands
Courage and the adrenals
Cretinism
a thyroid deficiency
effect of feeding thyroid in
Cretinoid type
Cretin
Crime, treatment of
Criminals and endocrine types
Critical ages
Curling
Cushing, Harvey
Dangerous age, the
Darwin, Charles
as a neurasthenic genius
his "Descent of Man"
his theory of Pangenesis
Davenport
Deficiency, mental
Development
Diabetes, and the pancreas
Diet, effect of on the endocrine glands
Directorate, endocrine glands as a
Diseases and endocrine types
Division of labor
Drug addiction and endocrine types
Dwarfs
Education, of vegetative-system
vocational
Egomania
Elixir of life
Emergencies, adrenals glands of
Emotions, adrenals glands of
Endocrine
analysis
charging of wishes
constitutions
control in color of races
corporation
deficiency in old age
epochs of life
glands
and feeblemindedness
and insanity
as an interlocking directorate
bases of variation
bearing on breeding
discovery of
effect of diet on
influence upon body
influence upon mind
inferiority
neurosis
personality
sex traits
types
alcoholism and
criminals and
diseases and
drug addiction and
narcotism and
Endocrines, evolution of
Endocrinology, applications of
possibilities of
Energy
and thyroid
Enthusiasm and thyroid
Environment, influence of
Epilepsy, in genius
Epochs of life, endocrine
Eugenics, negative
positive
promises of
Eunuchoid face
personality
Eunuchoidism
Eunuchs
Evolution, human, effect of internal secretions upon
Exhibitionism
Expressionism
Eyes
Face, adrenal
eunuchoid
hyperpituitary
hyperthyroid
Facial types
Family, and mixed sex
Fat, distribution of
Fat people
Fate and Anti-Fate
Fatigue and industry
as an endocrine deficiency
relation of adrenals to
relation of thymus to
Fear
mechanism of
relation of adrenals to
Feeblemindedness and the endocrine glands
Feminine pituitary type
Feminine precocity
Feminoid complex
constitution and personality
Fertilization
Fight, relation of adrenals to
Fingers, pituitary and
thyroid and
Forgetting
Freedom
Freud
Freudianism
Freudians
Friedleben
Galli
Galton
Genius, epilepsy in
migraine in
neurasthenic
treatment of
Giants
Girl, endocrine types of
Glands, definition of
endocrine, as an interlocking directorate
discovery of
influence on body
influence on mind
Goitre, relation of iodine to
Gonads
and libido
and sexuality
and thymus
Gonads and thyroid
function
secretion
Gonad-centric personalities
homosexuality and
Growth
relation of thymus to
Guilford
Gull
Hair
and adrenals
and pineal
and thymus
and thyroid
Hands, and pituitary
and thyroid
Henle
Hermaphrodite
Hermaphroditism
functional
influence of adrenals in
influence of pituitary in
Hibernation
and the pituitary
Historic personages
Darwin, Charles
Julius Caesar
Napoleon
Nietzsche
Nightingale, Florence
Wilde, Oscar
History, internal secretions in
von Hochwart
Homosexuality, and gonad-centric type
and thymus type
Hormones
harmony of the
Horsley
Howitz
Human nature
attitudes towards
case against
science and
Hunger
Hunter, John
Hygiene of the internal secretions
Hyperpituitary face
skin
Hyperpituitrism,
Hyperthyroid face
skin
type
of girl
pregnancy in
premenstrual molimina in
Hyperthyroidism
Hysteria
Imagination, an endocrine gift
Improvement of racial stock
Industry, and fatigue
relation of endocrines to
Infancy, epoch of the thymus
Infantilism
Infantiloid constitution or personality
Inferiority, breeding of
Inheritance of acquired characters
Insanity, and the endocrine glands
Instinct
Instincts, pituitary
thyroid
Insuline
Intellectuality, and the pituitary
Internal secretions, determinants of vegetative pressures
effect of, upon human evolution
hygiene of
in history
Interstitial glands, see Gonads
type of teeth
Iodine, in thyroxin
relation of to goitre
Janet
Judgment
Julius Caesar, an epileptic
pituitary in
Keith
Kendall
Kinetic chain
drive
system
Kocher
Laennec
Lanugo
Larey
Libido and gonads
sex
Life, well-springs of
Lime salts, and sex
Lincoln, Abraham
Lutein
MacDougallians
Malthusian law of slavery
Mammary glands
corpus luteum and
placenta and
Man, a transient
attitude of towards himself
a product of glands of internal secretion
critical age in
secondary sex characteristics of
Manic depressive psychoses
Mankind, races of
Marie, Pierre
Masculine, the secret of the
Masculine and feminine, mechanics of, and see Sex
Masculine pituitary type
Masculinoid women
Masochism
Maternal instinct
different from sex instinct
relation of the pituitary to
Matings, desirable and undesirable
Megalomania
Memory
Mendelism
Menopause
Menstruation
and ovaries
cycle of
Mental deficiency
Migraine in genius
Mind, influence of glands on
oldest part of
Mitchell, Weir
Mixed sex and the family
Mixed types
Möbius
Modernism, reactions to in adrenal types
Moods, and the organic outlook
Moral irresponsibility and thymus type
Mujerados
Müller, Johann,
Murray
Muscles
Mutations, control of
Myxedema
operative
Napoleon, case of
Narcotism, and endocrine types
Nature's experiments _vs_. Man's
"Nerves"
Nervous breakdowns
Neurasthenia
Neurosis
adrenals and
endocrine
war
Nietzsche, case of
Nightingale, Florence, legend of
Normal, what is
Obesity
Operative myxedema
Ord, William
Ovaries, internal secretion of
relation of to menstruation
removal of, effect of
rôle of
Oversecretion
Pancreas
diabetes and
function of
removal of
secretion of
Pangenesis, Darwin's theory of
Parathyroids
function of
secretion of
Paulesco
Pawlov
Permutations, of types of personality,
Perry, Caleb
Personality, background of
combinations of types of
determined by the endocrines
endocrine
eunuchoid
types of
adrenal
combinations of
gonad-centric
nature's experiments _vs_. man's
permutations of
pituitary of
Philosophers, prejudices of
Physics of the wish
Physiologists, attitude of
rôle of
Pigment cells and the adrenals
in skin of various races
Pineal gland
and hair
and childhood
feeding of to children
function of
muscle function of
Pineal gland, obesity and
puberty and
relation of to adrenals
to progressive muscular atrophy
secretion of
type of muscles
Pituitary gland
action of
and fingers
and toes
compared with thyroid
diminished action of
extirpation of
function of
in Julius Caesar
in Oscar Wilde
instincts
overaction of
personalities
regulator of organic rhythms
relation to adrenals
to growth
to hair
to hermaphroditism
to hibernation
to imagination
to intellectuality
to judgment
to maternal instincts
to memory
to puberty
to rejuvenation
to sex difficulties
to sexual glands
to stature
to thymus
secretion of
secretion, characteristics of inferior
characteristics of sufficient
type
feminine
masculine
of eyes
of hands
of muscles
pregnancy in
premenstrual molimina in
Pituitary-centered type
Pituitocentrics, Caesar
Darwin
Napoleon
Nietzsche
Nightingale
Pituitrin
function of
Placenta
and mammary glands
Placental gland
Plater, Felix
Plummer
Poise
Popielski
Possibilities of endocrinology
Postpituitary type of girl
Precocity, feminine
male
Pregnancy, in various endocrine types
Premenstrual molimina, in various endocrine types
Progressive muscular dystrophy and the pineal gland
Prostate
Pseudo-hermaphroditism and the adrenals
Psychanalyst, as a therapeutist
Psychology, new
Psychopathology of every day life
Puberty
glands, see Gonads
in female
significance of
Public health, prospects of
Pure types
Puericulture, science of
Races of mankind
Reactions to modernism in adrenal types
Rejuvenation, possibilities of
Religion of science
Repression
Resilience of skin
Restelli
Reverdin, J.L.
Rhythms of sex
Robertson
Sadism
Schiff, Moritz
Science, and human nature
origin of
religion of
Secondary sex traits
Secretin
Secretion
Sella turcica
Semon, Sir Felix
Senility, epoch of endocrine deficiency
interpretation of
Sensitivity
Sex
and lime salts
attitudes towards questions of
cause of
chemistry of
characteristics, secondary
conflict
crises
difficulties, pituitary and
glands, see Gonads
and hair
and puberty
and muscles
centered
chain
index
instinct
different from maternal instinct
libido
life, determining factors of
mixed, and the family
rhythms of
traits, or characteristics
endocrine
origin of
primary
secondary
Sexual cravings
glands, see Gonads, and Sex glands
and pituitary gland
Sexuality, and gonads
and adrenal glands
Shaw, G.B.
Shell-shock
Skeletal types
Skin
adrenal type
and adrenals
hyperpituitary type
hyperthyroid type
pigmentation
subadrenal type
subpituitary type
subthyroid type
Slavery, Malthusian law of
origin of
Soul, chemistry of the
Starling
Statesman, problems of
why he fails
Stature, pituitary and
Status lymphaticus, and thymus type
Steinach
Stirner, Max
Subadrenal skin
Subpituitary skin
Subpituitary type of women
premenstrual molimina in
Subpituitism
Subthyroid face
skin
type
of eyes
of women, pregnancy in
Subthyroidism
Sugar metabolism
Super-Careerist
Susceptibility
Sympathetic system
Teeth
Tethelin
action of
function of
Thymic face
Thymo-centric personalities
Thymo-centric type
Oscar Wilde
Thymus
and gonads
and pituitary
and puberty
and sexual glands
and thyroid
effect of castration on
effect of feeding thymus to animals
extirpation of
function of
hair and
hyperactivity of
infancy, epoch of the
persistent, skin of
relation of fatigue to
relation of growth to
relation of weight to
removal of, effect on gonads
secretion
type of teeth
Thymus type
homosexuality and
moral irresponsibility and
status lymphaticus and
Thyroid gland
and adrenals
and baldness
and energy
and enthusiasm
and intersitial glands
and judgment
and memory
and pancreas
and pituitary
Thyroid gland and puberty
and rejuvenation
and skin
and thymus
antitoxic function of
as an accelerator
as a catalyser
as a differentiator
as an energiser
compared with pituitary
creator of land animals
deficiency
effect of feeding the gland
excess
functions of
hair and
instincts
personalities
secretion of, and see Thyroxin
type, of eyes
of hands
of muscles
of teeth
Thyroid-centered type
Thyrotoxin
Thyroxin
and energy mobilization
and energy production
and speed of living
Toes
pituitary and
thyroid and
Tonus
Types
endocrine
adrenal
adrenal-centered
alcoholism and
combinations of
cretinoid
criminals and
diseases and
drug addiction and
facial
hyperthyroid
mixed
narcotism and
of girls
pituitary,
pituitary-centered
pure
skeletal,
subthyroid
thyroid-centered
Unconscious, the
and the viscera
physical basis of
Undersecretion
Variation
endocrine glands as basis of
Varieties of internal secretions
Vegetative apparatus
Vegetative pressures
internal secretions
determinants of
Vegetative system
education of
Virilism
Viscera
the unconscious and
Vocational education
War neurosis
Weight relation of thymus to
White races
endocrine control in
Wilde, Oscar
explanation of
Wishes
endocrine charging of
physics of
Women
adrenal type of
masculinoid
secondary sex characteristics in
X-chromosome
Yellow races
endocrine control in