THE RHYTHMS OF SEX 161 



of the breasts parallels indeed more or less the activity of the 

 corpus luteum. 



With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during preg- 

 nancy, prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secre- 

 tion of the post-pituitary would now cause the change from the 

 internal cell secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing 

 by the placenta. When the placenta is removed, after labor, the 

 post-pituitary can act, and a free flow of milk is established. 

 However, to counterbalance this, and to prevent the post- 

 pituitary from overacting, the breasts secrete a hormone with an 

 action like that of placenta, but not so strong, which tends to 

 inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition of a pregnancy 

 upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother, infant, and 

 embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and 

 compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole en- 

 docrine system. 



Critical Ages 



The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian 

 writer as a more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when 

 sex function ceases, the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the 

 age of adolescence is just as much of a dangerous age as 

 the age of deliquescence. The only difference between them 

 is that the dangers of the one have been hushed up, the dangers 

 of the other well boomed and advertised. Both are dangerous to 

 the individual, because both are periods of instability and read- 

 justment of the cells, particularly the brain cells, to a deranged 

 endocrine system and blood chemistry. 



Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an 

 effect of experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures 

 produced by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene 

 O'Neil's play, "Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as 

 she is in her youth, when her ovaries have budded and bloomed 

 for only a few years, and her other endocrine influences 

 are still dormant. She breaks off her engagement to Captain 

 Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because she is informed 

 of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on his last voy- 

 age, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The next act 

 shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster, she is 

 passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual 



