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FOREWORD 



By Sir Arthur Keith, F.R.S. 



I should mislead readers were I to assure them that this book, written 

 by an anatomist who has given half a century to the elucidation of the 

 human body and by a surgeon who stands in the forefront of his pro- 

 fession, reads as easily as a work of fiction. Books which are fundamental 

 in character are not easy reading, and this is a work of the kind. And 

 yet the story which Dr. Gladstone unfolds is a romance. To trace the 

 origin and evolution of the human pineal body or epiphysis, he has had 

 to go back to an early stage of the world of life, one some 400 millions of 

 years removed from us, when median as well as lateral eyes had appeared 

 on the heads of our invertebrate ancestry. His search has not been con- 

 fined to the geological record ; he has brought together from the literature 

 of comparative anatomy and from his own observations what is known of 

 median eyes and the pineal organ in all types of living forms, both inverte- 

 brate and vertebrate. 



If Dr. Gladstone's story begins in a past which is very distant, that 

 which Mr. Wakeley has to tell belongs to the present and the future. His 

 story opens a new chapter in surgery, that which is to deal with the diag- 

 nosis and treatment of disorders of the pineal body. 



It is many years since Dr. Gladstone and I became students and 

 friends at the University of Aberdeen, and friends and students we have 

 remained ever since. We have in that time seen strange changes in the 

 anatomy of the human body — structures such as the pituitary, thyroid, 

 and adrenal, which we counted negligible, soar to positions of dominance ; 

 we have seen parts of the brain such as the hypothalamus, which we 

 regarded as mere wall-space of the third ventricle, become the seat of 

 fundamental and vital processes ; and we have seen some structures 

 dethroned. Although the " pineal gland " had fallen from its high estate 

 long before Gladstone and I became students, it is of interest to compare 

 the opinion which Descartes formed of it in the seventeenth century with 

 the conclusions reached by our authors in the twentieth century. 



Those who are familiar with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy 

 will recall Mr. Shandy's wish to discover " that part where the soul 

 principally took up her residence." Let me quote from the original : 



