198 Discussion 



Desaulles: That is a very important point, because it is very well 

 known that if you castrate an animal and the time-lag is too great, the 

 responsiveness of certain sexual adnexal organs disappears. We used 

 the following method in our work. We castrated the animals, in these 

 and other similar experiments, and at different periods after castration 

 we tested the sensitivity of their sexual adnexa. We observed that 

 what was found by Parkes and Deanesley about 20 years ago is still 

 absolutely valid. You must begin the experiments between two and 

 three weeks after castration ; after that the sensitivity diminishes very 

 rapidly. If you wait from one to three months some responses disappear 

 completely, and you need very high dosages of the substance to obtain 

 resensitization of certain organs. 



Swyer : I was thinking not so much of that, but of whether the re- 

 sponse to the adrenal steroids shows a sex difference which is diminished 

 but not entirely removed by castration. 



Desaulles : I have not enough experience of all the effects that may be 

 considered to say anything definite about this point, but it still seems to 

 me that castration in itself does not suffice to abolish certain existing 

 differences between the sexes in their response to adrenal steroids. 



