August 6, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



167 



their desire for battle, the growth of eoinb 

 and wattles and the sexual instinct. 

 Berthold draws the conclusion from his ex- 

 periments that the generative organs influ- 

 ence the consensus partium by acting upon 

 the blood and through this upon the organ- 

 ism as a whole. 



The observations of Berthold were for- 

 gotten and even discredited (Rudolf 

 Wagner) and they had no influence appar- 

 ently on the development of work in this 

 field during the following half century. 



I can not leave this part of my subject 

 without mentioning the work of the great 

 Frenchman, Claude Bernard, whose dis- 

 covery of glycogen in the liver and else- 

 where must always rank as one of the great 

 discoveries of physiology. With perfect 

 justice Bernard declared that the conver- 

 sion of glycogen into sugar and the passage 

 of the latter into the blood constitutes the 

 internal secretion of the liver, while the 

 bile constitutes its external secretion. 



One other investigator, the modem pi- 

 oneer in this field, a restless spirit, a man of 

 enthusiasms, possessing an original mind 

 of a high order, one who is of especial inter- 

 est to Americans, can not be passed by with- 

 out mention. Charles Edward Brown- 

 Sequard was born at Port Lotiis, Mauritius, 

 on April 8, 1817. His father was an Amer- 

 ican, his mother a French woman, but he 

 himself, it is stated, always wished to be 

 regarded as a British subject. After a 

 varied career in four countries (England, 

 France, Mauritius and the United States) 

 having held the chair of physiology in Har- 

 vard from 1864 to 1867, he finally, in 

 1878, succeeded Claude Bernard as pro- 

 fessor of experimental medicine in the Col- 

 lege de France, where he remained until 

 his death in 1894. 



As far back as 1869 Brown-Sequard took 

 the position in his lectures in Paris that all 

 glandular organs, irrespective of whether 



they possess external excretory ducts or 

 not, give off to the blood substances which 

 are useful and necessary for the body as a 

 whole, an opinion, as we have seen, that 

 had already been stated by Theophile de 

 Bordeu in 1775. He even made experi- 

 ments on himself with a testicular extract, 

 and the meeting of the Paris Societe de 

 Biologic, June 1, 1889, at which Brown- 

 Sequard, then 72 years old, made his report 

 on these experiments, Biedl calls "the true 

 birthday of the doctrine of internal secre- 

 tion. " 



From this time an ever-increasing army 

 of experimental laboratory workers have 

 been engaged in this field. Their names 

 even can not here be given, neither can I 

 go into detail with regard to the great and 

 fundamental contributions that have been 

 made by medical clinicians, surgeons and 

 anatomists, as Basedow, Graves, Addison, 

 Marie, Gull, Ord, Kocher, Eeverdin, Min- 

 kowski, Von Mering, Sandstrom and others,, 

 to name only some of the leaders of the 

 immediate past, not to speak of the excel- 

 lent contributions that have been made in 

 recent years by our own surgeons and 

 internists. 



And so there has gradually come into 

 existence an enormous store of facts, phys- 

 iological, pathological, chemical and clinical, 

 in regard to a number of structures that 

 are classed as endocrinous glands or organs 

 of internal secretion. 



What is meant to-day by this term, prod- 

 ucts of internal secretion, and what organs 

 furnish principles that can be classed as 

 internal secretions ? 



For the present we shall follow custom 

 and apply the term to definite and specif- 

 ically acting indispensable chemical prod- 

 ucts of certain organs {organs that may or 

 may not have an external secretion) , which 

 are poured into the blood and modify the 

 development and growth of other organs, 



