256 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



the history and status of the organs and viscera. There would be 

 librarians to collect, abstract and collate the vast, accumulating 

 literature. In short, the mystery of personality, the most mar- 

 velous, complex, and variable process in the universe, would be 

 attacked and at length penetrated systematically and persis- 

 tently, with the ideal of absolute control of its composition as 

 the goal in view. 



The nature of the researches? They would be infinite in their 

 variety and significance. Their practical by-products, dropped 

 in the pursuit of knowledge by the scientist, as Atalanta's lover 

 the golden apples in his race, to assuage the scent of the hard- 

 headed business man, would be profitable enough for any country 

 in peace or war, to pay for itself ten times over and at compound 

 interest. A volume could be filled with suggestions for interest- 

 ing and promising investigations. But we may glance at some 

 of the immediately useful aspects that might exercise those con- 

 cerned with the everyday life of men, women and children. 



The Endocrine Epochs of Life 



There is no more famous classifications of the epochs of life 

 that mark off the milestones of the individual's evolution than 

 Shakespeare's Seven Ages. So different is he at those different 

 stages of his development, so changed his body and mind that 

 it has become a part of popular physiology that we are entirely 

 made over every seven years, and that no cell in the organism 

 lasts longer than that. The tradition certainly does not apply 

 to the brain and nervous system, for the number of brain cells 

 is fixed at birth, and cannot be increased, only decreased, because 

 they are too highly specialized to reproduce themselves. 



What transfigures the individual as the years go by is no simple 

 wear and tear of the tissues, nor the replacement of old cells by 

 new. It is the rearrangement of relationships among the ductless 

 glands, the shifting of influences from the pn dominant to I 

 subordinate, and vice vena, in the constellation of the internal 

 secretions, that determines the unfolding of the personality. The 

 transformations raise doubt sometimes as to the reality of p 

 sonal identity. "What actually happi I changes from child- 



hood to adolescence, fro; nd so on, is 



the sloughing of one internal glandular dominance for another. 



Growth, as a general for the mutations, the ensemble of 



somatic and ps\ ntiation, from year to year, passes 



