SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES 243 



of small doses of work and large doses of rest. So he was enabled 

 to publish twenty-three volumes of original writing and fifty-one 

 scientific papers. Living a sort of quasi-sanitarium life, with the 

 rules and regulations of one undergoing a rest cure for thirty-six 

 years, he thus accomplished infinitely more than the millions who 

 have led the strenuous life. That he thus survived, as a genius, 

 among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment for 

 which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put 

 down in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of 

 wife and children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he 

 lacked. All these details I have given in the attempt to analyze 

 the internal secretion constitution of this great man of genius, 

 to establish that he really suffered from inadequate function of 

 his adrenal glands, for the symptoms of chronic though benign 

 adrenal insufficiency coincide in their mass effect with the story 

 of his life. He was not a good animal, as Herbert Spencer de- 

 clared was a first sine qua non of the successful life. He was a 

 poor animal, the poorest of animals, because he possessed poor 

 adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally superior pitui- 

 tary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid, which 

 combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack. 

 According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in 

 bed, and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did. 



What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease 

 he was a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiog- 

 nomy, documentary and that left in portraits and photographs. 

 He was tall and thin and his frame was naturally strong and 

 large. Face was ruddy, and his grey eyes looked out from 

 under deep overhanging brows and bushy eyebrows. The ears 

 were large and prominent, the hair straight, the nose broad and 

 well developed. All these are distinctive pituitary traits. The 

 photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his 

 chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary 

 type physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of 

 essays entitled "Darwinism and Modern Science," edited by A. 

 C. Seward and published in 1909). Charles Darwin, we may 

 say, then, lived the life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, 

 the anterior portion dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, 

 and an adrenal much deficient, the combination settling the 

 fate of a grand intellect in an invalid. It is interesting to note 

 that an extant portrait of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's distin- 

 guished grandfather, shows a pituitocentric, but with a rounder 



