150 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



tuate in their activities, may divide prematurely the tides or 

 dam them completely. 



Innumerable varieties and combinations of interglandular ac- 

 tion supply us with the limitless types of adolescent girls. Some 

 endocrine cooperatives that make one girl stable and settled, will 

 make others unstable and unsettled. Alicia may be hyperthy- 

 roid, and so excitable, nervous, restless, and subject to palpitation 

 of heart and sleeplessness. Bettina may have too much post- 

 pituitary, and so will menstruate early, tend to be short, blush 

 easily, be sentimentally suggestive and sexually accessible. 

 Christina may be adrenal cortex centred and so masculinoid: 

 courageous, sporty, mannish in her tastes, aggressive toward her 

 companions. Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid and 

 pituitary and so lead the class as good-looking, studious, bright, 

 serene and mature. Florence, who has rather more thyroid than 

 her pituitary can balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but 

 moody, energetic, but not as persevering. And so on and so on. 



Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only 

 to bring out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to 

 suppress and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peace- 

 ful, calm, semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obses- 

 sive according to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise 

 of the ovaries. Harmony, and so continued happiness of the mind 

 and body, means that they have been welcomed into the fold. 

 Disharmony, ailments, unhappiness, difficulties, mean that they 

 are being treated as intruders, or are acting as marauders. The 

 after life, sexually the period of maturity, barring accidents, 

 diseases, and shocks, will bear the same character. The kind of 

 adolescence provides the clue to the kind of maturity, for both 

 are effects of the same endocrine factors. 



The Sex Gland Chain 



Furthermore, the activities of a normal woman involve a 

 series of sex glands. Since there function, in addition to the 

 ovaries, the glands of the uterus, the breasts or mammary glands, 

 and the placental gland (the secreting cells of the tissue which 

 comes out as the after-birth). Each of these contributes directly 

 to the reproductive life of the individual. To call the ova the 

 sex glands is to confer upon them a name which really belongs 

 to a chain of glands. 



All of the members of the sex chain, including those of the 



