42 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



have existed. And for ages the diminution of sexual activity as 

 a predecessor to the decadence of senility has been harped upon. 

 Rejuvenation, especially in connection with sexual activity, as 

 will as with tissue and spiritual elasticity, has been one of the 

 haunting phantoms of the imagination for as long as we have 

 .Is of articulate humanity. Together with El Dorado, the 

 Elixir of Youth has shared the honors with the Philosopher's 

 Stone. The idea of employing the chemical materials of the sex 

 is, the testes or the ovaries, to bring back youth, to restore 

 juvenility, had not, as far as we know, occurred to anyone who 

 at any rate put himself on record, by word or deed, until 1889. 

 The hero of the new departure was the hero of so many daring 

 adventures among speculative experiments, Brown-Sequard. 



At this time the wanderer was an aged sage, seventy-two years 

 old, fit, as custom goes, only for retirement and resignation to 

 the fate of all flesh. The old passion of experimenting upon him- 

 self as well as upon the guinea-pigs, dogs, cats and monkeys, by 

 which he was always surrounded, was as alive and kicking as 

 ever. I suppose he had been thinking for years concerning some 

 method for the resumption of youth, for we find him exclaiming, 

 when the opportunity loomed of a great laboratory on Agassiz 

 Island, Long Island, on one of his recurrent flights to New York: 

 "Would that I were thirty!" And other passages in his personal 

 communications refer again and again to his consciousness of 

 growing old. The miracles that were being performed by inject- 

 ing thyroid and feeding thyroid in animals probably acted as 

 the spark to an inflammable mass of ideas long smouldering in 

 the subcellars of his mind. The effects were reported to the 

 Society of Biology in Paris, one memorable evening, June 1, 1889, 

 in two notes on the results of the hypodermic injection in man 

 of the testis juice of monkeys and dogs, and certain generaliza- 

 tions deduced therefrom. Such juices, he stated, had a definite 

 energy-mobilizing or, as he put it, dynamogenic action upon 

 the subject himself, stimulating amazingly his general health, 

 muscular power and mental activity. 

 These experiments, their nature, the manner in which they 

 conducted, the character and age of the experimenter, and 

 the results claimed, were exquisitely good stuff for ridicule. Car- 

 ets and reporters leaped upon the theme with the avidity of 

 rue-blue interviewer. Paris, where to be ridiculed is to be 

 killed in public with the most ignominious of deaths, reacted as 

 only the French temperament can react. The wits of the salons 



