e it in a test-tube, indeed to possess it in large
quantities in bottles, to be able to manipulate and examine it without
fear of the co-action of admixed impurities, to see it with the eye,
and to taste it with the tongue, was truly a marvel. The miracle
aroused at once scores of researches.
THE GLAND OF COMBAT AND FIGHT
Considering its effects, one is reminded at once of the similarity
to the expression of a primitive emotion like anger or fear. So, by
turning a relation upside down, it was argued that if artificial
adrenalin could produce all these effects of an emotion like fear, the
emotion itself should produce an increase of the natural adrenalin in
the blood. This was found to be the case. Cannon of Harvard has built
up an entire theory of the adrenal as the gland of emergencies upon
the basis of these effects. In the facing of crises the adrenal
functions as the gland of combat. And indeed, as I have mentioned,
the more combative and pugnacious an animal, the more adrenal it has,
while the timid and meek and weak have less.
The Glands of Combat, the glands of emergency energy, the glands
of preparedness,--such are the adrenal glands when viewed from the
adrenalin standpoint. A picture of its activity in the evolutionary
scheme of struggle and survival is something like the following:
meeting an enemy, the animal is put in danger. It must fight or flee
for its life. In either case, certain conditions must be fulfilled, if
the body of the animal endangered is to be saved. To prevent injury to
itself, and to do as much injury as possible to the foe--that becomes
its immediate urge and necessity. Of the two animals, if in one the
heart should begin to beat more strongly, the blood pressure to rise,
the blood to flow more rapidly through the attacking instruments, the
muscles, the teeth and claws, the brain and its eyes, while the other
animal experiences none of these, the former will be the victor in
fight or flight. Adrenalin may be looked upon as the invention for the
mobilization at a moment's notice, or as we say, after generations of
use, by instinct, of all these visceral and blood advantages in the
struggle of combat or flight.
The nature of instinct, in its relation to the glands of internal
secretion, is a problem for another chapter. But we may note that the
James-Lange theory of an emotion regards it as a consciousness of the
very changes in the organism adrenalin causes. Since adrenalin is the
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