92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



DUCTLESS GLANDS, INTERNAL SECEETIONS AND 

 HORMONIC EQUILIBRIUM. II 



By FIELDING H. GARRISON, M.D. 



WASHINGTON, D. C. 



In the first half of the nineteenth century the accepted view of the 

 phenomena of secretion was tliat enunciated by Johannes Mliller, viz., 

 that the process consists of two phases — secretion proper, or the casting 

 out of substances upon a surface inside the body, as in the case of tlie 

 gastric juice; and "excretion" or the voiding of such secreted sub- 

 stances into the external world, as in the case of bile or urea. This dis- 

 tinction was somewhat artificial, since bile, urea and other excreted sub- 

 stances are also secretions in the first instance. In 1801^" the French 

 physiologist Legallois, as Gley has noted, surmised, from the identity in 

 composition of all varieties of arterial blood and the diversity of venous 

 blood in different parts of the body, that this diversity is acquired, in 

 each case, from the loss of some substance to the organ from which the 

 vein proceeds. Thus Borden's idea: A (arterial blood) =^S (secretion) 

 -j- V (venous blood), and Legallois's idea: V (venous blood) =A (arte- 

 rial blood) — S (secretion) are identical. When A and S are chem- 

 ically known, A being constant, V will be known ; or, when A and V are 

 known, *S' will be known. V is always a variable. This remarkable intui- 

 tion of Legallois, like the hypothesis of Borden, remained on a theoretical 

 basis and was not put to experimental proof. In 1849, A. A. Berthold,^'^ 

 a Gottingen professor, is said to have transplanted the testes of a fowl to 

 another part of its body, with complete retention of its sexual characters, 

 a phenomenon which he inferred to be due to " the productive relation 

 of the testes, i. e., to its effect upon the blood and thence through the 

 corresponding effect of such blood upon the entire organism." This 

 apergu, again, does not differ materially from that made by Bordeu in 

 the eighteenth century. In the meantime the ductless glands were 

 coming to be known among the German physiologists as "blood-vessel 

 glands" {Blutgefdssdrusen) or "blood glands" (Blutdriisen) and 

 were regarded by the histologists Henle and Kolliker as preparers of 

 different chemical substances which are utilized by the organism through 

 the blood. Beyond this general theory, which is identical with Borden's, 

 no special function could be assigned to the different ductless glands. 

 Even Henle asserted that these glands have no influence whatever upon 

 animal life, that they can be extirpated or undergo pathological degen- 

 eration without affecting either the sensory or motor functions of the 

 body. The path-breaking importance of Addison's great monograph on 

 the effect of disease of the suprarenal capsules may be thrown into 

 relief by citing Hyrtl's witticism about the suprarenal — that the un- 



16 Legallois, "CEuvres," Paris, 1824, II., 209-210. Cited by Gley. 

 "Berthold, Mutter's Arch., Berlin, 1849, 42. 



