SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES 241 



had a great deal of attention paid to his life and personality. 

 Yet not until the publication of his Autobiography and his son's 

 Reminiscences was it generally known that he suffered from 

 chronic ill health for most of his adult life. Dr. W. A. Johnston, 

 in an article in the American Anthropologist, 1901, has marshalled 

 a number of available facts, to sustain his thesis that Darwin 

 was a victim of neurasthenia. Now neurasthenia, it is now ac- 

 cepted, is simply a waste-basket word, corresponding to the class 

 miscellaneous in a classification of any group of real objects. 

 And, as has been emphasized in preceding chapters, most neuras- 

 thenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine foundation, most often, 

 an insufficiency of the adrenals. That is, a defect in the chain 

 of co-operation, balance and compensation among the internal 

 secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous system 

 the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only 

 names. Darwin's case was pretty certainly that. 



There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatiga- 

 bility, a lack of stamina and endurance in mental as well as 

 physical application which plagued him from the late twenties 

 to the sixties. As a child, he was strong and healthy, fond of 

 outdoors, and though underrated by his teachers, noted to be pos- 

 sessed of intense curiosity, especially concerning natural objects. 

 At school he was a fleet runner and cultivated a habit of long 

 walks. Then he was surely no neurasthenic. Three years which, 

 he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted, at Cam- 

 bridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting. His good 

 health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 

 22. Thereafter his troubles began. 



What was Darwin, so far as his endocrine composition was con- 

 cerned? In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocen- 

 tric, of the post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, 

 exceedingly corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest 

 of observers and the most sympathetic of men. He wished to 

 make a physician out of his son in order to carry on the medical 

 tradition of the family: Erasmus Darwin was a physician before 

 him. His son, however, showed no inclination for so learned 

 and confining a profession and had to be reproached by his father 

 in these immortal words: "You care for nothing but shooting 

 dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and 

 all your family." 



Cambridge came after Edinburgh, as he was rushed from medi- 

 cine into the clergy. But in vain. A friendship struck up with a 



