SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES 235 



were what impressed his associates at St. Helena. The deterio- 

 ration of his mentality was also exemplified in his literary diver- 

 sions, the "Siege of Troy" and the "Essay on Suicide." The 

 puerility of these productions, as well as of his conduct, a sulking 

 before his captors, and the decline of his physical energy, once a 

 bottomless well, all point to the same conclusion. 



The rise and fall of Napoleon followed the rise and fall of his 

 pituitary gland. No better illustration exists of the fundamental 

 determination of a personality and its career by an endocrine, 

 aside from other factors of education, environment, accident and 

 opportunity. Without the sort of endocrine equipment he was 

 born with, however, none of the other factors would have found 

 the material to work upon. Born, say, with more of a posterior 

 pituitary than he had, which would have rendered him more 

 sensitive to the sufferings of his fellow-creatures, if nothing else, 

 and the forces of the Revolution probably would have swamped 

 him from the very first moment of his emergence at Toulon, 

 when the whiff of grape-shot, symptom of an inexorable, merciless 

 intellect and will, started him upon the road that led to the 

 Napoleonic Era. Destiny is always ironic. For the deficiency 

 of the internal secretions which made him eligible for glory was 

 responsible as well as for his downfall. 



Epilepsy and Migraine in Genius 



In the annals of genius, there occur a number of instances of 

 those who suffered from attacks that have been diagnosed epi- 

 lepsy or migraine. Because their ailment was associated with 

 their extraordinary ability, they attracted an attention that 

 concerned itself not at all with the circumstance that genius has 

 also been liable to measles, scarlet fever, and so on. Epilepsy 

 and rngraine certainly occur in people of no supernormal gifts, 

 and often in degenerates and subnormals. Yet the fact remains 

 that these affections of the nervous system, so terrible to feel and 

 to behold, have afflicted the finest brains of the race. 



About forty years ago the idea established itself that epilepsy, 

 exhibiting itself in one form or another as "fits," and migraine, 

 the severe periodic sick headache, were interconvertible mani- 

 festations of the same underlying morbid process in the brain. 

 Nothing in the way of a concrete cause, attackable on the mate- 

 rial side, was elicited by this generalization. Then the inves- 

 tigations of the pituitary in the last decade produced evidence of 



