PREFACE 



THIS book represents, with considerable additions, the 

 substance of the Vanuxem Lectures, given at Prince- 

 ton University in February 1942. The invitation to 

 be Vanuxem Lecturer carried with it the expressed wish of 

 the Committee that I should discuss the hormones of the 

 reproductive system for the benefit of a general audience, 

 assuming on the part of my hearers no familiarity with 

 biology. This imposed no easy task, for it called upon me to 

 describe some of the most intricate and elaborate mechanisms 

 of the body, to listeners who perhaps had never seen the 

 organs and tissues in which these activities take place. The 

 structure of the living cells and the manner in which they are 

 put together to form the organs are matters not merely so 

 unfamiliar, but actually even so daunting to most people, as 

 to create serious difficulties for the biologist and physician 

 who tries to explain his work. For the first time in my life I 

 could have wished I were an astronomer or physicist, for the 

 heavenly spheres, their orbits and attractions, and even such 

 matters as warps in space and corpuscles of light can be 

 described to a certain extent in terms of the workshop and 

 the household; but how can we explain the marvels of the 

 human egg or the action of an estrogenic hormone without 

 a background of cellular biology.'* My only recourse has been 

 to begin at the very beginning, to devote as many as three 

 chapters to general preparation for actual discussion of the 

 hormones, and at every step to explain and illustrate the 

 underlying anatomy and physiology as clearly as possible. 

 This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time an 

 American university has devoted one of the great endowed 

 lectureships to the subject of human reproduction. A few 

 years ago it might even have been impossible to break through 

 the old conventions that hampered free public discussion of 

 this subject. We have a tradition that sex and reproduction 



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