The Glands Regulating Personality Part 6

A little girl of 2, 3, or 4 years of age perhaps will come to exhibit the growth and appearance of a girl of 14. She begins to menstruate, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s swell, she shoots up in height and weight, sprouts the hair distribution of the adult, and the mentality of the adolescent, restless, acquiring, doubting, emerge. A tot bewitched into p.u.b.erty!

A boy of six or seven may suddenly, in the course of a few weeks or months, become a little man, robust, rather short and stocky, but moustached, with the muscular strength and s.e.xual powers of a man and thinking as a man. It is all as if into some fermentable medium or solution a little yeast were dropped that changed the quiet calm of its surface into a bubbling, effervescing revolution. It suggests at once that maturation, the transformation of the child into the man or woman, must be due to the pouring into the blood and the body fluids of some substance which acts like the yeast in the fermentable solution. The adrenal cortex is one source of the maturity-producing internal secretions.

If trouble in the adrenal cortex starts after p.u.b.erty, phenomena of the same type, but of a different order, exhibit themselves. A woman, say in the thirties, becomes thus afflicted. Slowly or quickly her body will be covered by an abundant growth of hair, more or less of a beard and moustache appear upon the face, her voice will become deep and penetrating, her muscles will harden, and she will show a capacity for hard physical labor. s.e.xually she appears to be made over, masculinity now predominates in her make-up. Virilism is the name by which the French in particular have popularized the knowledge of the condition. Virilists have to shave or be shaved regularly and are not bothered in the least by the cares, responsibilities, jealousies and anxieties of personal beauty, for the change in their spirituality makes them immune to the preoccupations of the feminine. The cause of such a transformation in a previously entirely normal woman has been found to be a tumor of the adrenal cortex.

But not only is s.e.xuality, and the conduct of the secondary s.e.x characters, connected with the adventures of the adrenal cortex. The development of the master tissues of the body, the brain, the pride and darling of evolution, is in some subtle way correlated with it. The adrenal cortex contains more of the phosphorus-containing substances of the general nature of those found in the central nervous system than any other gland or non-nervous tissues in the body. During human intrauterine life the adrenal glands are large and conspicuous, in the first half of the second month being twice as large as the kidneys. Most of this relatively huge size, which happens in the human alone, and not in other animals, is due to enlargement of the cortex.

Should this preponderance of the cortex over the medullary portion not occur in the human, that is, if the proportions remain like those of other animals, the brain fails to develop properly, or an entirely brainless monster is generated. The human brain, therefore, probably owes its superiority over the animal brain, to the adrenal cortex, in development anyhow. The growth of the brain cells, their number and complexity is thus controlled by the adrenal cortex.

Besides its action upon the s.e.x cells and the brain cells, the internal secretion of the adrenal cortex acts upon the pigment cells of the skin, blunting their sensitiveness to light. In degeneration of the interior of the gland, which destroys the medulla, but not the cortex, the color of the skin is left unmodified. If, however, the cortex is invaded, as happens most often in the cla.s.sical tuberculosis of the adrenals which drew the attention of the Englishman Addison to them, then a darkening of the skin, which may go on to a negroid bronzing, follows. That means an increased sensitiveness of the pigment cells of the skin to light. Skin color control may therefore be looked upon as an adrenal cortex function.

So much is known about the adrenal cortex. Upon the medulla, the interior gland of the gland, there has been lavished an amount of attention beside which the cortex is to be cla.s.sed as a neglected wall-flower. Nearly everything that possibly could be determined about an internal secretion has in its case been settled or plausibly guessed at. The cells manufacturing the secretion, its exact chemistry and function, its action upon the blood, the liver and spleen, the heart and lungs, the brain and nervous system, have been minutely investigated, studied and charted. Its source in the food, its fate in the body, its place in the history of the individual and the species, its importance as a weapon in the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest have been made the subject of an astonishing number of researches, considering the short period of scarce three decades that intensive science has centered its barrage upon it.

In the first place, the medulla contains numerous nerve cells, belonging to the vegetative, also called the sympathetic nervous system. But these nerve cells are merely minor notes of the symphony.

The motif is settled by a majority of large, granular cells, which stain a distinctive yellowish-brown when the gland is fixed in a solution of bichromate of potash. All chromium salts, in fact, stain the therefore labelled chromaffin cells. The characteristic staining power appears to be dependent upon, or correlated with, the presence of the internal secretion of the medulla of the adrenal, adrenalin.

For the content of adrenalin, as calculated chemically, and the depth of stain as seen under the microscope, rise and fall together.

Chromaffin reaction and adrenalin content go together. The poisonous skin glands of the toad have been found to give a marked chromaffin reaction, and to contain a large amount of adrenalin. Other ma.s.ses of cells in the human body, especially along the course of the sympathetic nervous system, have been shown to give the reaction and to contain adrenalin.

The erratic Brown-Sequard pounded and hammered away for more than thirty years on the importance to life of the adrenal glands, since death occurred so quickly after their removal. But it was not until Schaefer, the Scotch physiologist, (who has done more than any other living man to stimulate study of the internal secretions) found that an extract of them, when injected into a vein, produced a remarkable though temporary rise of the blood pressure, that a real enthusiasm for its investigation was generated. As the upshot, a number of other significant properties besides the first of blood-pressure raising, have been put down to its credit. Chemical tests demonstrated that it originated in the medulla. The exact amount of it present in the medulla, in the blood issuing from the adrenals and in the circulation in general have been determined. The concentration in the blood is about one part in twenty million, while there is about a hundred thousand times as much stored in the gland as reserve. In infections and intoxications, after muscular exertion, and with profound emotions, there is a decrease of it in the gland and an increase in the blood. Pain and excitement, especially fear and rage, will bring about its discharge from the gland. With its entry into the blood, there is a tremendous heightening of the tone, a _tensing_, of the nervous system. The nerve cells become more sensitive to stimuli, more sugar is poured into the blood from the liver, more red blood corpuscles are squeezed into the circulation from the blood lakes of the liver and spleen. There is a redistribution of the whole blood ma.s.s, a good deal of it being withdrawn from the internal viscera, and hurried to the skeleton muscles and the brain. The heart beats more strongly, the eye sees more clearly, the ear hears more distinctly, and the breathing is more rapid. The temperature rises, the hair of the head and the body becomes erect, the skin gets moist and greasy.

It will help a fatigued muscle to regain its normal tone. In short, it has a reinforcing action upon the nutritive properties of the blood, the tone of the muscles, and the activity of the brain and the vegetative nerves.

Chemists set themselves the task of discovering just what was the substance possessed of such extraordinary and hitherto unimagined properties. The pure adrenalin was isolated, capable of evoking all the reactions of the impure adrenal extract mixtures. The final triumph was the preparation of it artificially in the laboratory, its synthesis. When a substance can be synthesized in the chemist's laboratory, it means that its composition has become thoroughly understood. Here at last was an example of those mysterious internal secretions, the existence of which had indeed been postulated and proven, but which had never actually been inspected by the eye of mortal man. To have it in a test-tube, indeed to possess it in large quant.i.ties in bottles, to be able to manipulate and examine it without fear of the co-action of admixed impurities, to see it with the eye, and to taste it with the tongue, was truly a marvel. The miracle aroused at once scores of researches.

THE GLAND OF COMBAT AND FIGHT

Considering its effects, one is reminded at once of the similarity to the expression of a primitive emotion like anger or fear. So, by turning a relation upside down, it was argued that if artificial adrenalin could produce all these effects of an emotion like fear, the emotion itself should produce an increase of the natural adrenalin in the blood. This was found to be the case. Cannon of Harvard has built up an entire theory of the adrenal as the gland of emergencies upon the basis of these effects. In the facing of crises the adrenal functions as the gland of combat. And indeed, as I have mentioned, the more combative and pugnacious an animal, the more adrenal it has, while the timid and meek and weak have less.

The Glands of Combat, the glands of emergency energy, the glands of preparedness,--such are the adrenal glands when viewed from the adrenalin standpoint. A picture of its activity in the evolutionary scheme of struggle and survival is something like the following: meeting an enemy, the animal is put in danger. It must fight or flee for its life. In either case, certain conditions must be fulfilled, if the body of the animal endangered is to be saved. To prevent injury to itself, and to do as much injury as possible to the foe--that becomes its immediate urge and necessity. Of the two animals, if in one the heart should begin to beat more strongly, the blood pressure to rise, the blood to flow more rapidly through the attacking instruments, the muscles, the teeth and claws, the brain and its eyes, while the other animal experiences none of these, the former will be the victor in fight or flight. Adrenalin may be looked upon as the invention for the mobilization at a moment's notice, or as we say, after generations of use, by instinct, of all these visceral and blood advantages in the struggle of combat or flight.

The nature of instinct, in its relation to the glands of internal secretion, is a problem for another chapter. But we may note that the James-Lange theory of an emotion regards it as a consciousness of the very changes in the organism adrenalin causes. Since adrenalin is the starter of the whole process, and since McDougal has defined emotion as the feeling aspect of an instinct, just as an instinct may be defined as the motor aspect of an emotion, the adrenals as emotion-genetic, and instinct-genetic, play a part in the most profound processes of the subconscious and unconscious.

THE MECHANISM OF FEAR

We may therefore visualize a mechanism of fear. An instant excess of adrenalin occurs in the blood of, say, a cat when it is alarmed by the sight of a dog. In that cat, at the image of its hereditary enemy, certain brain cells vibrate. A nerve tract, in use as the line for that particular message in a hundred thousand generations of cats, whirrs its yell to the medulla of the adrenal gland. Through the tiny, solitary veins of the glands, an infinitesimal quant.i.ty of the reserve adrenalin responds. And with what an effect! The blood, that primary medium of life, the precious fluid that is everything, must all, or nearly all, be sent to the firing line, the battle trenches, the brain and muscles, now or never. So the blood is drafted from the non-essential industries--from the skin where it serves normally to regulate the heat of the body--from the digestive organs, the stomach and intestine, which must forsooth stop now, since if the organism will die, their last effort of digestion has been done--from the liver and spleen, great chemical factories in normal times, but now of no moment. Besides, should they be wounded, it is better they should be bloodless, and so run the least chance of bleeding to death, or getting infected, for the more tissue there is around, the greater the danger of infection. So, like the skin, the liver which usually holds in its great lakes and vessels about a quarter of all the blood in the body, is almost drained and blanched. At the same time, its great storehouses of sugar open their sluices and pour into the blood, increasing its sugar content by about a third because the combustion of sugar is the easiest way of getting energy free in the cells, sugar being the most quickly burned up of all the foods, and so the great food of the muscles and the heart. The poisons of fatigue, acid products of the contraction of muscles, are antagonized and neutralized by substances formed in the course of the oxidation of the sugar. Adrenalin, too, is directly fatigue antagonist. It causes the blood to clot faster than under ordinary circ.u.mstances. It erects the hair of the animal, and dilates the pupils of the eyes. There is an increase of the apparent size, all of which are to intimidate the enemy, like an Indian's painting of his face blue and green. It also--but what else does it not do?

The story of adrenalin would have delighted the heart of Samuel Butler. His "Note Books," opulent as they are, would have been the richer in pages and pages with his comments on it. Contending as he did with the pompous, dogmatic mechanism worship of the new scientific clique of his time on the one hand, and the superst.i.tions of the old theological caste on the other, he had to fight the hardest kind of guerrilla warfare in defense of the Purpose of Life. Adrenalin, that weapon of a gland tracing its ancestry back to the begetter of the brain itself, for brain and adrenal gland both have evolved from the small nerve ganglia of the invertebrates, would have backed up to the hilt his argument, which he had to elaborate on the indirect grounds of a.n.a.logy and induction. Essential for defense, and for protection,-- an organ in which everything necessary for the stratagems of retreat, or the offensives of attack, are supplied ad libitum, while everything non-essential or detrimental to the matter of the moment is inhibited, arrested and suppressed--no more perfect sample of the design with which Life is drenched could be imagined by the most closeted of pa.s.sionate idealists.

FAILURE OF THE ADRENALS

As the gland of acute stress and strain, the adrenals in modern life are called upon to function more heavily and frequently than in the past. As a matter of fact, the life of the beast of jungle and field, as well as of savage and barbarian, is just as full of emergencies and shocks as that of the average city man or woman. In the case of the latter, however, inhibitions, education, and the conditions of modern living, improper food, sedentary indoor confinement, and universal rack and noise, have undoubtedly made greater and greater demands upon the adrenal glands. Chemical quant.i.tative studies have shown that by repeated stimulation, the adrenal glands may be exhausted of their reserve supply of secretion, which returns only insufficiently if not enough time is given for recuperation. There results a condition of temporary or chronic adrenal insufficiency, supposedly an insufficient functioning of the gland as a whole. In persons so afflicted there appears a fatigability, a sensitiveness to cold, cold hands and feet, which are sometimes mottled bluish-red, a loss of appet.i.te and zest in life, and a mental instability characterized by an indecision, and a tendency to worry, a weepishness upon the slightest provocation.

A certain number of the temporary breakdowns or nervous prostrations, which seem to be growing more common or fashionable, may be sometimes traced to such a deficiency of normal response to the needs of everyday conflict by the adrenal gland. In some, mental and physical elasticity are totally lost, and even the slightest exertion in either field often causes so much weariness and exhaustion as to be prohibited. Depression and even melancholia are a.s.sociated with the fear of not being able to accomplish good work hitherto easy and enjoyed. Sometimes they are obsessed with the thought that they have lost their nerve completely, and so dread to commit themselves in even the most trivial of situations. The vacillating frame of mind is so distressing at times as to arouse thoughts of suicide. When these symptoms concur in the type of personality whom I shall describe as the unstable adrenal-centered individual, there is evidence for explaining the process as the effect of an insufficiency of secretion by the adrenal gland.

Shock, collapse, heart failure and sudden death following abnormal emotion, like an attack of rage, or the terrors of a railroad accident, or bad news, or excessive exertion like running a long race or climbing a high mountain when in poor general health, as the phrase goes, or in the terminal stages of infections like epidemic influenza or Asiatic cholera, have been put down to an acute insufficiency of the adrenal gland. A lowered temperature, blood pressure, and blood vessel tone, exhibited in tests of the response of the skin to stroking, are present in all of these and point the same moral.

In the second half of the 19th century, an American physician, Beard, described Neurasthenia, a general disturbance of the body and mind, not properly cla.s.sifiable as a disease, but serious enough to incapacitate or at least greatly limit the sufferer. The neurasthenic is to be recognized by the fact that the most painstaking objective examination of his organs reveals nothing the matter with them. Yet, according to his complaint, everything is the matter with him. He cannot sleep when he lies down, he cannot keep awake when he stands up. He cannot concentrate, but still he is pitifully worried about his life. The slightest irritant causes him to go off the handle. As he works himself up into his hysterical state as a reaction to a disagreeable person or problem, irregular blotches may appear on his face and neck. Generally, his hands and feet are clammy and perspiring, his face is abnormally flushed or pallid, the eyes are worried or starey, unwonted wandering sensations involving now this area of the body, or now that obsess him. As the blood pressure is too low for the age, the circulation is nearly always inadequate and palpitation of the heart is a frequent complaint. So frequent, that attention is often centered upon the heart, a diagnosis of heart disease is made, and the unfortunate is doomed for life--to brood over horrible possibilities. The brooding over themselves and their troubles is one of the distinctive features of the whole complex.

Neurasthenia may masquerade as any organic disease. An individual with a soil for a neurasthenic reaction to life will become neurasthenic when confronted by any stone wall, including a serious ailment within himself.

Beard's Neurasthenia leaped at once into the limelight. It was seized upon and applauded in Europe as a good new name for an old condition, observed particularly in Americans abroad to rest from the fatigues of the get-rich-quick games of industrial speculators. In fact, the name of the American Disease was given to it. Various theories about the effects of climate, sunlight per square inch and unit of time, oxygen content of the air, and so on, were offered up upon the altar of scientific explanation. Sir Arbuthnot Lane, famous protagonist of Lane's intestinal kink, said that all Americans were neurasthenic.

Neurasthenia became one of the most popular of diagnoses, and remains so today.

Neurasthenia, regarded as a reaction of people to the stress and strain of life, has without a doubt increased. The most casual of observers will tell you that the generation of the Great War is a neurasthenic generation. It takes its pleasures too intensely, its pains too seriously, its troubles too flippantly. But what is neurasthenia? Beard himself regarded it as a chronic fatigue and loss of tone of the nervous system, a literal interpretation of his term.

That the conception, as far as it goes, is valid is proved by the fact that it is the neurasthenics who furnish the majority of the clientele of the cults, the Christian Scientists, the osteopaths and the chiropractors, and who are the subjects of the faith and miracle cures, like those of Lourdes. That is because their particular disease, or what appears to them to be their very own disease--and they certainly cherish their ailments--is but an expression of, a compensation for, indeed a consolation for, the underlying feelings of insufficiency or inferiority. Were there no moral code, were there no social system, nor the consequent inculcated conscience to be responsible to, there would be no such disguising symptom as the disease which preoccupies the consciousness. The feeling of insufficiency would be there, and would be recognized as in itself the disease. To the physiologist and the psychologist, the feeling of insufficiency is the disease, no matter how spectacular the overlaying phenomena--a cripple on crutches or a man blind and speechless. Sh.e.l.l shock is now acknowledged to belong to this group.

Now one of the outstanding effects of disease of the adrenal glands is the feelings of muscular and mental inefficiency. And as a matter of fact, a good number of observations conspire for the idea that a certain number of neurasthenics are suffering from insufficiency of the adrenal gland. The chronic state of the acute phenomenon, known as the nervous breakdown, really represents in them a breakdown of the reserves of the adrenals, and an elimination of their factor of safety. In the light of that conception, the great American disease--dementia americana--is seen to be adrenal disease--and the American life to be the adrenal life, often making too great demands upon that life, and so breaking down with it.

ADRENAL EXCESS

The converse of adrenal insufficiency, that of adrenal excess, also exists. In certain types of the middle-aged, a high blood pressure, accompanied by a great capacity for work, has been shown to be a.s.sociated with hypertrophy of the cortex. In women, there is a degree of masculinity, as the adrenal in women makes for masculinity, neutralising more or less the specifically feminine influences of the internal secretions of the ovary. Such women possess a vigor and energy above the normal, and command responsible positions in society, not only among their own s.e.x, but also among men. They are the ones who, in the present overturn of the traditional s.e.x relationships, will become the professional politicians, bankers, captains of industry, and directors of affairs in general.

THE GONADS

(_s.e.xual, p.u.b.erty or Interst.i.tial Glands_)

The gonads is the name applied to the generative or reproductive glands considered collectively. In the male, they are the testes; in the female, the ovaries. They are, therefore, sometimes called the s.e.xual glands. As they possess definite ca.n.a.ls for the removal of their gross secretion, the specific reproductive cells, ova or spermatozoa, to a surface of the body, they are first of all glands of external secretion. But they have been also found to hold secretory cells not concerned with the making of the reproductive corpuscles, but, as all the evidence indicates, with the manufacture of an internal secretion. These interst.i.tial cells form the interst.i.tial gland. A cla.s.sic example of a gland of internal secretion lodged in the interstices of a gland of external secretion is thus furnished by the gonads.

ORIGIN OF s.e.x TRAITS

The history of s.e.x goes back far in the scheme of life. The immortality of the ameba was at one time one of the indisputables of biology. Then some observations were made which threw doubt upon a long accepted fact, now declared a dogma. Lately, opinion has veered back to immortality. But in the case of a close relative of the ameba, the one-celled animal known as the paramecium, union with another paramecium, true conjugation, has been proved necessary to prevent death sooner or later. s.e.x here appears in its most primitive form, on the basis of exchange of necessary materials, between individuals to prevent death, their own having been, so to speak, worn out, in the course of metabolism.

Specifically different s.e.xes come later, when mortality is a universal fate, as a means of rebirth and escape from death. Then the s.e.xes develop their latest function, most prominent among the younger vertebrates, of acting as nature's most potent method of variation and differentiation. In the pursuit of the different, nature has exalted s.e.x, and the intensity of the s.e.x life. As far as the preservation of a species is concerned, and the reproduction of the individual, the as.e.xual methods, budding, for example, would have done well enough.

But when it comes to enacting a different individual apart from the effects of environment, s.e.x stands out as the favored method of Life.

The development of the s.e.xes and the s.e.xual life brought a new element of conflict into the living world. Before the advent of the s.e.xes the conflict was essentially for the means of existence, food alone. But with the s.e.xual life came a conflict for s.e.x pleasure, a compet.i.tion among members of the same species for the same individual as their s.e.x partners. The result was the introduction of a factor in evolution which Darwin examined so closely in the "Descent of Man."

The s.e.x conflict has been the cause for the origin and the survival of certain physical and mental traits, helpful in s.e.x attraction, s.e.x combat, the growth of the embryo, and the nutrition and safety of the young of a species,--in short, the whole process of s.e.xual selection.

The proportions of the skeleton, the distribution of hair and fat, the construction of organs of attack and defense, the color of the skin, the cyclic processes of preparation for impregnation, the oestrus or heat period in animals, the menstrual period in the human being, the psychic reactions to danger and combat have all been thus determined.

That man is bearded while woman is not,--that woman has potentially functional b.r.e.a.s.t.s while man has not,--the aggressive pugnacity of man contrasted with the more pa.s.sive timidity of woman, have all been evolved in the s.e.x struggle, surviving because most effective in that struggle. These so-called secondary s.e.xual characteristics are an expression of the influence of the internal secretion of the gonads, or the interst.i.tial glands. Some call them p.u.b.erty glands, because their ripening initiates p.u.b.erty.

We know that these interst.i.tial glands, to stick to that name, (rather than to the name of the p.u.b.erty glands, since they serve not only to induce p.u.b.erty but to maintain maturity) are the actual primary dictators of the process by which male and female are distinguished, if not created. Castration was probably the first surgical operation carried out for experimental purposes, suggested no doubt by a curiosity concerning its effects. Trepanning of the skull, the geologic record indicates, was done even by the cave man. But as an experimental operation, castration seems to hold the primary position in the annals of surgery.

Its effects noted, the satisfaction of one of the lower human instincts, jealousy, popularised it. From the days of Semiramis, eunuchs have been commonplace figures of the East, their function definite: to guard the harems of the powerful. The age of Abdul Hamid witnessed no diminution of the barbaric tortures by which children are prepared for the profession. It is to the credit of England that in its dominions in the Orient the practice has been abolished. But it goes on even today. According to the best authorities, four out of five of these victims at the auto-da-fe of a vicious human instinct die immediately or soon after from exhaustion due to pain and infection. Not all of the ancient nations countenanced the brutal horror. The Hebrews placarded castration an unpardonable sin, making it a sin to castrate even animals. Nor was any man so mutilated permitted to worship in the house of the Lord (Deuteronomy xxiii, 11).

Yet we have evidence that the latter Jewish kings employed foreign eunuchs in their harems, who often held the most important positions as ministers of the court.

Besides the eunuchs, another group of people have presented material for the study of the interst.i.tial glands. These are the Skoptzi of Russia and the Lipowaner of Roumania. Among them castration is a religious ritual. Mankind has always been most brutal to itself in the name of the ideal. These sects were founded because in the eighteenth century an antipode of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young discovered this pa.s.sage in Matthew xix, 12.

"For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs _which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake_. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

He decided that he was inspired to spread the gospel of castration. A sect was founded who thought that surgery was the easiest way to enter the gates of Paradise, and they multiplied and fructified. The sect exists today, and some of the most interesting studies of the internal secretion of the interst.i.tial glands have been made among them.

Related to acquired eunuchism is the condition of eunuchoidism, the eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb. Baron Larey, the great surgeon of Napoleon's armies, was their first painter. He was the only altruist Bonaparte said he had ever met in his life. He portrayed a group of soldiers with peculiarly high-pitched voices, smooth and hairless skins, and atrophied generative organs. A somewhat similar picture is evolved in certain types of insufficiency of the pituitary gland. Features of the picture are exhibited with disturbances of the other internal secretory glands also, like the thymus.

But a host of experiments and data prove the interst.i.tial glands to be the direct controllers of elementary s.e.xuality and the specific s.e.x traits of male and female. Beginning with Berthold back in the first half of the nineteenth century, who studied the fowl, a number of observations have been made on the effects of excision, translocation and transplantation of these glands.

The results of the experiments and observations can be summed up as follows: if the male individual is castrated before p.u.b.erty, that is, before the advent of the s.e.xual life, secondary s.e.x qualities do not develop. In males, the generative organs do not grow, hair on the face does not appear, hair elsewhere on the body remains generally scanty, the voice continues as high-pitched as the child's, there is more or less muscle weakness, obesity, and mental sluggishness. In other words, we have an effeminate man, technically a eunuch. In the castrated female, the pelvis does not grow to the normal feminine size, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s do not swell as they should, more or less hair comes out on the face, the voice is low-pitched, and tends to be rather husky, the legs are longer, and again, the mentality is dulled. That is, a masculine sort of woman is produced.

In short, the castrated male takes on a feminine type, and the castrated female, a male type. In either case there is also an infantilism, a retention of the infantile mental traits, a lack of development of the adult mental att.i.tudes and reactions. Now, if in the castrated male is transplanted an ovary, the positive characteristics of the female are evoked, such as enlarged mammary glands, and a tendency to secretion of milk. Experiments have also been reported in which a uterus was also placed in such an animal, with a means of entry, and pregnancy followed. If in the castrated female a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e is planted, the masculine traits become much more marked and striking. A direct exchange of the male and female roles can thus be achieved. Castration after p.u.b.erty cannot modify profoundly structures like the skeleton which are already completed.

Yet it may unquestionably bring about definite retrogressive changes in the secondary s.e.x characters: reduction or loss of virility, diminution of facial and body hair, and a general presenility or hastening of senility.

How remarkably these interst.i.tial cells influence the entire structure and vitality of the organism is indicated by these facts. How much they have to do with s.e.xual impulses, s.e.xual excitement, and s.e.xual desire, what the Freudians have popularized as the libido, and how subtly they act upon the coming and duration of adolescence and maturity, as well as s.e.xual precocity and peversions, we shall consider in a later chapter. But it is enough now to remember that these interst.i.tial glands are the primary dictators of the genital sense and flair of the individual. In any attempt at measurement of men and women, the quality and quant.i.ty of the internal secretion of the interst.i.tial cells must be respected as a fundamental consideration. The womanly woman and the manly man, those ideals of the Victorians, which crumbled before the attack of the Ibsenites, Strindbergians and Shavians in the nineties, but which must be recognized as quite valid biologically, are the masterpieces of these interst.i.tial cells when in their perfection. They are such solely because of the right concentration in the blood of the substances manufactured not only by these cells, but by all the glands of internal secretion. For it cannot be repeated and emphasized too often that the interst.i.tial cells of the s.e.x glands are most sensitive to all kinds of other influences, and, in particular, the other internal secretory organs. They may indeed be watched as an index scale or barometer of the general tone of the whole internal secretion system.

s.e.x variations offer a variety of clues to variations, disturbances, predominances and abnormalities in all the components of the ductless gland a.s.sociation.