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On the Hypertrophy of the Interstitial Cells in the Testicle of the 

 Guinea-Pig under different Experimental Conditions. 



By Alexander Lipschutz, M.D., Professor of Physiology (in collaboration 

 with Benno Ottow, M.D., Charles Wagner, Sc.D., and Felix Bormann). 



(Communicated by F. H. A. Marshall, F.R.S. Received October 11, 1921.) 



(From the Physiological Institute of the University of Dorpat, Esthonia.^ 



[Plates 1 and 2.] 



I. 



Quantitative problems are, no doubt, of the greatest theoretical and 

 practical interest in the study of the internal secretion of the sexual glands. 

 We are explaining different physiological and clinical situations by changes 

 in the quantity of internal secretion of the sexual glands or of other glands 

 of internal secretion connected with the former. It suffices to mention 

 normal puberty, menstruation and gravidity, eunuchoidism and pubertas 

 prascox. Quantitative problems were already discussed when the first steps 

 were made in the study of the question of the site of the internally secretory 

 function of the sexual glands (1). Bouin and Ancel(2) tried to cause by 

 different experimental means a compensatory hypertrophy of the interstitial 

 cells of the testicle ; they extirpated the testicle in rabbits on one side and 

 ligatured the vas deferens on the other side ; they found a proliferation of 

 the interstitial cells, whereas the number of the cells of .Sertoli remained 

 unchanged. Further, they extirpated the normal testicle of pigs with 

 unilaterally retained testicle (3). They found in these experiments that 

 the weight of the retained testicle was about twice as much as when the 

 normal testicle was present. They found also in these cases a marked hyper- 

 trophy of the interstitial cells. Sand (4) confirmed these statements in his 

 experiments on rabbits and guinea-pigs using his method of experimental 

 cryptorchism. From all these experiments one could conclude that the 

 hypertrophy of the interstitial cells takes place as a compensatory hyper- 

 trophy of the elements acting as an organ of internal secretion. 



But there are some objections one can make against this conception. 

 Ribbert (5) has shown that after unilateral castration the remaining testicle 

 is greater than normally, and that there is a marked hypertrophy of the 

 seminiferous part of the testicle. From experiments performed in our 

 laboratory, we can state (6) that the hypertrophy of the remaining testicle is 

 so marked that it weighs twice or thrice as much as a normal testicle of an 



