248 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



Yes, I do see the difference now between me and other men. 

 When a disaster happens, I act, and they make excuses." 



Lytton Btrachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. 

 But for us his most significant passage is the following: 'When 

 old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, 

 having waited patiently, played a queer trick upon Miss Night- 

 ingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long lif< 

 only been equaled by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in 

 hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness 

 with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredn* 

 years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not 

 to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: 

 she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance 

 and complacency. The change came gradually, but at 1 

 .kable." 



"There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical 

 mould. The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye, and her 

 acrid mouth, had vanished, and in her place was the rounded, 

 bulky form of a fat old lady, smiling all day long. Then some- 

 thing else became visible. The brain which had been steeled at 

 Scutari was, indeed, literally growing soft. Senility — an ever 

 more and more amiable senility — descended." 



We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with 

 another case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens 

 when pituitary hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunc- 

 tion or inferiority is precisely as Strachey has described so clev- 

 erly of the "ministering angel": the acrid, thin and keen 

 degenerate every time into the amiable, fat and dull. Just as 

 Napoleon was transformed by the mutations of his pituita: 



• with the Lamp. And in both instance! the con- 

 Qg modifications, from one I of glandular function 



lipply IM with the clue to the secret hand oi 

 Of and becoming, which worked upon the twial 



umstance abort them as a sculptor upon clay. 

 The official biography l»y three 



itl, representing 



theeii < nd life 1 



as she was at 25, and pictun 



very etn 1 willowy in ; thick and shortish rich 



to comp 

 Ot grace is so like a si 



face is long and oval, of tl kind. Then 





