292 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



further investigation by their dogmatic decision that there was 

 no function to be found. In so doing, however, they were 

 merely exploiting the ignorance of their times in the interest 

 of a preconceived theory, which whetted their appetite for 

 discovering, at all costs, the presence in man of functionless 

 organs. 



Their anxiety in this direction led them to consider the 

 whole group of organs constituting a most important regula- 

 tory and coordinative system in man and other vertebrates 

 as so many useless vestigial organs. This system is called the 

 cryptorhetic system and is made of internally-secreting, duct- 

 less glands, now called endocrine glands. These glands gen- 

 erate and instill into the blood stream certain chemical sub- 

 stances called hormones, which, diffusing in the blood, produce 

 immediate stimulatory, and remote metabolic effects on special 

 organs distant from the endocrine gland, in which the par- 

 ticular hormone is elaborated. As examples of such endocrine 

 glands, we may mention the pineal gland (epiphysis), the 

 pituitary body (hypophysis), the thyroid glands, the para- 

 thyroids, the islelets of Langerhans, the adrenal bodies (supra- 

 renal capsules), and the interstitial cells of the gonads. The 

 importance of these alleged useless organs is now known to 

 be paramount. Death, for instance, will immediately ensue 

 in man and other animals, upon extirpation of the adrenal 

 bodies. 



The late Robert Wiedersheim, it will be remembered, declared 

 the pineal gland or epiphysis to be the surviving vestige of a 

 "third eye" inherited from a former ancestor, in whom it 

 opened between the parietal bones of the skull, like the median 

 or pineal eye of certain lizards, the socket of which is the 

 parietal foramen formed in the interparietal suture. If the 

 argument is based on homology alone, then the coincidence in 

 position between the human epiphysis and the median optic 

 nerve of the lizards in question has the ordinary force of the 

 evolutionary argument from homology. But when one at- 

 tempts to reduce the epiphysis to the status of a useless ves- 



