its dominions in the Orient the practice has been abolished. But it
goes on even today. According to the best authorities, four out of
five of these victims at the auto-da-fe of a vicious human instinct
die immediately or soon after from exhaustion due to pain and
infection. Not all of the ancient nations countenanced the brutal
horror. The Hebrews placarded castration an unpardonable sin, making
it a sin to castrate even animals. Nor was any man so mutilated
permitted to worship in the house of the Lord (Deuteronomy xxiii, 11).
Yet we have evidence that the latter Jewish kings employed foreign
eunuchs in their harems, who often held the most important positions
as ministers of the court.

Besides the eunuchs, another group of people have presented material
for the study of the interstitial glands. These are the Skoptzi of
Russia and the Lipowaner of Roumania. Among them castration is a
religious ritual. Mankind has always been most brutal to itself in the
name of the ideal. These sects were founded because in the eighteenth
century an antipode of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young discovered this
passage in Matthew xix, 12.

"For there are some eunuchs which were so born from their mother's
womb, and there are some eunuchs which were made eunuchs of men: and
there be eunuchs _which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom
of heaven's sake_. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

He decided that he was inspired to spread the gospel of castration. A
sect was founded who thought that surgery was the easiest way to enter
the gates of Paradise, and they multiplied and fructified. The sect
exists today, and some of the most interesting studies of the internal
secretion of the interstitial glands have been made among them.

Related to acquired eunuchism is the condition of eunuchoidism, the
eunuchs which were so born from their mother's womb. Baron Larey, the
great surgeon of Napoleon's armies, was their first painter. He was
the only altruist Bonaparte said he had ever met in his life. He
portrayed a group of soldiers with peculiarly high-pitched voices,
smooth and hairless skins, and atrophied generative organs. A somewhat
similar picture is evolved in certain types of insufficiency of
the pituitary gland. Features of the picture are exhibited with
disturbances of the other internal secretory glands also, like the
thymus.

But a host of experiments and data prove the interstitial glands to be
the direc