258 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



to say, officially its involution begins. Careful dissection will 

 demonstrate some thymus tissue even in a normal subject up to 

 the fourteenth year. This refers to the average normal, for the 

 large thymus may continue large and grow larger after the 

 second year in the type of individual designated in a preceding 

 chapter as the thymocentric. 



If the thymus retrogresses after the second year, what takes 

 its place as a brake upon the forward driving impulses of the 

 other endocrines? We have every reason for assigning that role 

 to the pineal. It performs its service mainly, in all probability, 

 by inhibiting the sex stimulating effect of light playing upon the 

 skin. Since it is especially a sex gland inhibitor, the thyroid and 

 pituitary become freer to exert their influences than under the 

 thymus regime. And so we find that it is after the second year 

 that thyroid and pituitary tendencies manifest their effects. 

 The Pineal Era, from the second to the tenth to fourteenth 

 years, remains to be investigated from a number of viewpoints 

 interesting to the parent, the educator, and the student of pueri- 

 culture. Precocity is directly related to early involution of the 

 pineal. For just as the thymus involutes at the second year, the 

 pineal atrophies before the onset of adolescence. 



Adolescence is the period of stress and strain throughout the 

 somatic and psychic organism because of the volcanic upheavals 

 in the sex glands. The history of the individual is dominated by 

 them up to twenty-five or so, when maturity commences in the 

 sense of a relative sex stability. They continue to exert a power- 

 ful pressure throughout maturity. But life episodes and < 

 diseases, accidents, and struggles, experiences of pleasure and 

 pain, as well as climatic factors, settle finally which endocrine or 

 endocrines are left in control as a consequence of the series of 

 reactions the period of maturity may be analyzed into. 



The Interpretation of Senility 



Senility inevitably follows maturity, (right follows day 



by a j of the process of de- 



generation which lilt it. all the I'lands of int 



, !iy the <i 

 D rmi-t OOCUr DO one can : ury to the i 



M of one sort or mot 1 y from emot 



• 



ient. Just why i ma and I pre- 



