THE RHYTHMS OF SEX 155 



tion. The adrenal cortex makes for pugnacity, temper, animal 

 courage, irritability and anger reactions. So a hairy animal will, 

 in general (unless other endocrines come in to defeat the primary 

 effect) , be more pugnacious, courageous, irritable and combative. 

 The same applies to woman. An environment which tends to 

 encourage the masculine traits in her, to arouse repeatedly her 

 pugnacity and combative decisions in the more rapid give and 

 take of the masculine world, will rouse the adrenal cortex to 

 greater activity, and so make her face hirsute, her attitudes 

 aggressive, and perhaps render her sterile. Concomitantly there 

 may be a disturbance of menstruation. 



The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always 

 present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all 

 be donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up 

 of a woman. When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the 

 ovum may not be able to burst through the ovary, a necessity 

 before it may begin its travels to the uterus. Next, the propul- 

 sive action of the genital ducts may be insufficient because of 

 defective corpus luteum. Or the uterus may not have received 

 enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to make it fit soil for the 

 ovum to plant itself in. Or there may be too much of these, 

 which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by gentle contrac- 

 tions and so keep it well-toned. Excessive massage will throw 

 the ovum out. All these are factors in the sterility problem, with 

 its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct. 



The Maternal Instinct 



There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous 

 lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. 

 But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the 

 maternal instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about senti- 

 mentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an 

 apotheosis of it. There are some who deny its existence, and 

 assert that maternity is forced upon every woman. • Reduced to 

 its elements, such nonsense turns out the absurd pose of the 

 theorist desperate to epater le bourgeois or to cover up hidden 

 defects in his or her make-up. 



Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality 

 through somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were 

 sane enough, have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedon- 

 ism. So that the criminal who was condemned to roll a huge 



