THE ADRENAL GLANDS 71 



birth, the symmetrical correspondence and harmony of the pri- 

 mary sex organs and the secondary sex characters are not affected. 

 But there follows a curious hastening of the ripening of body 

 and mind summed up in the word puberty, a precocious puberty, 

 with the most startling effects. A little girl of 2, 3, or 4 years 

 of age perhaps will come to exhibit the growth and appearance 

 of a girl of 14. She begins to menstruate, her breasts swell, she 

 shoots up in height and weight, sprouts the hair distribution of 

 the adult, and the mentality of the adolescent, restless, acquiring, 

 doubting, emerge. A tot bewitched into puberty ! A boy of six 

 or seven may suddenly, in the course of a few weeks or months, 

 become a little man, robust, rather short and stocky, but mous- 

 tached, with the muscular strength and sexual powers of a man 

 and thinking as a man. It is all as if into some fermentable 

 medium or solution a little yeast were dropped that changed 

 the quiet calm of its surface into a bubbling, effervescing revolu- 

 tion. It suggests at once that maturation, the transformation-^" 

 of the child into the man or woman, must be due to the pouring 

 into the blood and the body fluids of some substance which acts 

 like the yeast in the fermentable solution. The adrenal cortex is 

 one source of the maturity -producing internal secretions. . — 



If trouble in the adrenal cortex starts after puberty, phenomena 

 of the same type, but of a different order, exhibit themselves. 

 A woman, say in the thirties, becomes thus afflicted. Slowly or 

 quickly her body will be covered by an abundant growth of hair, 

 more or less of a beard and moustache appear upon the face, her 

 voice will become deep and penetrating, her muscles will harden, 

 and she will show a capacity for hard physical labor. Sexually 

 she appears to be made over, masculinity now predominates in 

 her make-up. Virilism is the name by which the French in 

 particular have popularized the knowledge of the condition. 

 Virilists have to shave or be shaved regularly and are not both- 

 ered in the least by the cares, responsibilities, jealousies and— 

 anxieties of personal beauty, for the change in their spirituality 

 makes them immune to the preoccupations of the feminine. The 

 cause of such a transformation in a previously entirely normal 

 woman has been found to be a tumor of the adrenal cortex. 



But not only is sexuality, and the conduct of the secondary 

 sex characters, connected with the adventures of the adrenal 

 cortex. The development of the master tissues of the body, the 

 brain, the pride and darling of evolution, is in some subtle way 

 correlated with it. The adrenal cortex contains more of the 



