88 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



hasten development and differentiation, checking them perhaps 

 for a given time and so profoundly influencing growth. 



The Pineal 



The pineal is another gland which has been credited with 

 similar abilities and a like holding-the-reins-tight-in-childhood 

 function among the cells. Like the thymus, it has been supposed 

 one of the distinctive organs of childhood and to die with it. 

 Generations of anatomists solemnly asserted, repeating each 

 other's mistakes with the aplomb of the historians who declare 

 that history repeats itself, that the pineal body was a useless, 

 wastefully space consuming vestige of a once important struc- 

 ture. That was the view in that century of grandly inaccurate 

 assertions, the nineteenth. Not that they relegated it with that 

 statement to the limbo of the dull and the uninteresting. Quite 

 the contrary. They conferred upon it a distinguished romance 

 and mystery by identifying it as the last heir and vestigial rem- 

 nant of a third eye, situated in the back of the head, which may 

 still be observed in certain reptiles. Imagine it! Somewhere, 

 stuck away in a cranny of the floor of your head and mine, is 

 this descendant of an organ that once sparkled and shone, wept 

 and glared, took in the stars and hawks and eagles, and now is 

 condemned to eternal darkness and an ineffectual sandiness. 

 Today, we have not discarded that view of its history, but we 

 know a little more regarding its composition and function. 



What and where is the romantic object? It is a cone-shaped 

 bit of tissue hidden away at the base of the brain in a tiny cave 

 behind and above its larger colleague, the pituitary. Microscopic 

 scrutiny reveals that it is made up in part of nerve cells contain- 

 ing a pigment similar to that present in the cells of the retina, 

 thus clinching the argument for its ancient function as an eye. 

 But the outstanding and specifically glandular cells are large 

 secreting affairs, which too reach back to the tidewater days of 

 our vertebrate ancestors, when Eurypterus and other Crustaceans 

 were engrossed with the fundamental problems of brain versus 

 belly. Besides these, there are the singular masses upon which 

 has been fastened the unnecessarily opprobious epithet of brain 

 sand. These, noted and commented upon from the earliest times, 

 consist of collections of crystals of lime salts, sometimes small, 

 lying about in discrete irregular masses, and sometimes grouped 



