456 INTERNAL SECRETIONS 



was already determined, in the sense that there is a special 

 hormone-producing tissue in the sex glands ; but this need not 

 necessarily prevent one from using this term in a somewhat 

 different sense. 



As to the second assumption that puberty is the essence of 

 sexual maturation, it should be clear that from this standpoint 

 the term "puberty gland*' is convenient. Tandler and Gross 

 (1913, p. 751) objected that sexual hormones begin to act long 

 before puberty and continue to act long after it. Under these 

 circumstances they find it inconvenient to designate the 

 hormone-producing sex glands by a term which relates only 

 to a certain period of its activity. But Tandler and Gross 

 (1913, p. 72) themselves pointed out that puberty is in reality 

 not a process sui generis, the period of puberty not being a 

 time of new creations, but only a period when morphogenetic 

 processes already in existence are accelerated. But on the 

 view that puberty is not a process sui generis, the term *' puberty 

 gland" seems to be the most suitable one. For "puberty" is 

 really the S3nnbol of full sexual maturity in regard to somatic 

 and psychical characters, and at the same time the symbol of 

 an intense endocrine activity on the part of the sex gland and 

 the other organs of internal secretion. The term "puberty 

 gland" emphasizes that all the processes leading to sexual 

 maturity both during embryonic development and at the time 

 of actual puberty and after, have something in common, all of 

 them representing stages in the development of the sex 

 characters, and being correlated with different degrees of 

 hormone production. 



F. ASEXUAL EMBRYONIC SOMA AND HEREDITY. 



It has been suggested by Darwin that the male ''secondary" 

 sex characters are present, though in a latent condition, in 

 every female, and that female "secondary" sex characters 

 are present in every male ; and, further, that the latent char- 

 acters under certain circumstances are able to develop. This 

 suggestion will now be discussed from the point of view of our 

 hypothesis of the asexuality of the embryonic soma. 



There are many observations which seem to favour Darwin's 

 suggestion. 



(i) It is known that in mammals rudiments of the genital 



