HOW THE GLANDS WERE DISCOVERED 31 



which are used interchangeably. They are spoken of often as 

 the endocrine glands and as the hormone producing glands. 

 Endocrine is most convenient for it stands for both the gland 

 and its secretion. Hormone is employed a good deal in the lit- 

 erature of the subject. But it applies specifically to the internal 

 secretion, and not to the gland. 



The Experimental Pioneer 



All this clarification of the concept of the glands of internal 

 secretion occurred in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. 

 However, no inkling of their real importance to the body, of 

 which quantitatively they form so insignificant a part, was ap- 

 parently revealed to anyone. Not even the most daring specula- 

 tion or brilliant guess work in physiology engaged them as 

 material. Thus Henle, the great anatomist, calmly affirmed that 

 these glands "have no influence on animal life: they may be 

 extirpated or they degenerate without sensation or motion suffer- 

 ing in the least." Johann Miiller, the most celebrated physiologist 

 of his day and contemporary of Henle, wrote in 1844 and coolly 

 stated, "The ductless glands are alike in one particular — they 

 either produce a different change in the blood which circulates 

 through them or the lymph which they elaborate plays a special 

 role in the formation of blood or of chyle." In other words, they 

 were dismissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance to 

 the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art 

 of Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science 

 is more interesting than the progress of that science itself. He 

 might have added that nothing either was more interesting than 

 the contradictions in that progress. For while these grand moguls 

 of their sciences were enunciating their dogmas, pioneers here 

 and there were already setting the mines that were to explode 

 them. 



The experimental method, to the value of which biologists 

 were just beginning to awaken, was destined to be the vehicle 

 of Time's revenges. An application of it to the mysteries of sex 

 was the immediate occasion. Sex and sex differences have always 

 more or less obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes 

 of theories about them would constitute a respectable museum. 

 Certain gross facts, however, were known. 'fhe effects of loss 

 of the sex glands upon the configuration of the body and the 

 predominating constitution in animals and eunuchs have always 



