SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES 249 



gradually the ante-pituitary gained an ascendency in the concert 

 of her internal secretions, so coloring her life with its masculine 

 tints, and altering her face as well as her disposition. The pho- 

 tograph of her taken when she was 38 shows a quadrangular 

 outline, and all the acridity that impressed Strachey. The last 

 picture of her, a water color drawing made in 1907, shows a round 

 visaged old dame, who might be the peasant grandmother of two 

 dozen descendants. Little patches of red over the cheek bones 

 remind one of myxedema and indicate that toward the very end 

 of her life her thyroid failed her as well as her pituitary. So 

 that our biographer relates: "Then by Royal Command, the 

 Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and there was a 

 little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after a 

 short speech, stepped forward and handed the order of the in- 

 signia to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly 

 recognized that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind 

 — too kind!' she murmured; and she was not ironical." In the 

 days of pituitary and thyroid hyperfunction we may be sure she 

 would have been caustically and penetratingly ironical. 



The Explanation of Oscar Wilde 



The case of Oscar Wilde, as one of the high tragedies of English 

 Literature and Life, attracted the attention of the whole world 

 in its heyday, and even today evokes controversy. As a literary 

 figure and artist, the poet of the Portrait of Dorian Gray, and 

 "De Profundis," belongs without a doubt to the immortals. As 

 a convicted criminal, who served for two years at hard labor in 

 Reading jail, and afterwards, a prey to chronic alcoholism, died 

 in obscurity in Paris, he still remains a subject of whispered con- 

 versation in private, and his crime a taboo to the public, men- 

 tionable only at the risk of arousing the terrible odium sexicum 

 of the prurient majority. Oscar Wilde was a homosexual of a 

 certain type. In view of the previously laid down considerations 

 concerning the endocrine genesis of homosexuality, how are we 

 to explain him, and his natural history? 



As with the other exemplars of genius examined we need here, 

 too, to gain some insight into his "internal secretion heredity." 

 His father, Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon. Photographs of 

 him show the long and broad face of a pituito-adrenal centered 

 individual, with a corresponding duplex incarnation in the face, 

 the upper half strikingly spiritual, the lower curiously animal. 



