HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND 183 



to make more and more accurate judgments as one grows older 

 implies at least a maximum efficiency of it. This maturation is 

 not at all universal. Even after middle age, after forty and fifty 

 years of reasoning, some individuals retain the juvenile mind of 

 their youth. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and 

 forgotten nothing. Their ante-pituitary insufficiency often 

 coupled with a post-pituitary excess, and other instabilities and 

 disequilibriums in the endocrine system, render them immature 

 morons, compared with what might be expected of them for their 

 years. They are the people who are old enough to know better. 

 For the same reasons, inhibition and emotional control are poor 

 in them. 



Besides the ante-pituitary, in the evolution of judgment, and 

 the judgment faculty, due stress must be laid upon the influence 

 of the internal secretion of the testes or ovaries, the product of 

 the interstitial cells. Although the probability is that the effects 

 are indirect, through a stimulation of the ante-pituitary, the fact 

 remains that, in a child, memory may be marvelous and judgment 

 poor (such memory is possibly purely thyroid in its determina- 

 tion) . With the advent of the gonads upon the scene, judgments 

 become the centre of the play's plot undoubtedly. The intelli- 

 gence of eunuchs and eunuchoids is in general low. The skull 

 and brain of castrates, animal and human, is smaller than the 

 average. Gall, the physiologist who popularized ideas concern- 

 ing the meaning of the protuberances and depressions of the 

 head in relation to faculty and character, early in the nineteenth 

 century, was the first to prove this. Among historic castrates, 

 eunuchs, not a single example of great intellect, of the creative 

 type, is known. On the contrary, the native gifts of the mind 

 were destroyed. Thus Abelard, who was punished with castra- 

 tion by his uncle for his love affair with Heloise, never composed 

 a verse of poetry thereafter. 



Imagination as an Endocrine Gift 



That brings us to the consideration of imagination as influenced 

 by the endocrines. The physical conditions of exercise of the 

 imaginative faculty have not been sufficiently investigated. 

 Alcohol has long been known to act as an evocant of strange 

 images. The hallucinations of delirium tremens are the results 

 obtained in extreme intoxication. A strangely imaged flow of 

 the imaginative state, may also be evoked by 



