. This crime of analysis the intellect
commits every day in the search for truth. Before its dissection, it
seems to have to dip the elusive article in a fixative, and bottle it
in a vacuum.

Yet nothing in reality is more of a changing flux than the body in all
of its parts and tissues and organs. And of all these, the glands of
internal secretion stand out as the most susceptible to change. Made
to react to stimuli of offense and defense, instantaneously responsive
to situations involving energy exchanges and protective reflexes,
they are never for any minute the same or alone. They never function
separately. Each influences the other in a communicating chain. Let
one be disturbed, and all the others will feel the impact of the
disturbance and vibrate with it.

Any break in the somatic or psychic equilibrium, a blow or an
infection, or a startling thing seen, or a worrisome thought felt,
will start a process going. This will only wind up when every gland
has been somehow touched, and a final equilibrium reestablished. The
thyroid, maybe, was first excited, and then in turn the adrenals, with
a boomerang reinforcing effect upon the thyroid, and at the same time
a stimulating effect upon the pituitary. Each gland is thus influenced
and influencing, agent and reagent in the complex adjustments of the
organism.

ENDOCRINE CO-OPERATIONS

The body-mind is a perfect corporation. Not quite perfect, for
continually there arise little insurgencies, inadequacies and
frictions to which in time it will succumb. Yet, in the efficiency of
its co-operations, and in the co-ordination of the needs and supplies
of producer, middle man, and consumer, there is no one of the great
organizations of the captains of industry which can for a moment
approach it.

Of this corporation the glands of internal secretion are the
directors. But the huge corporation, not to topple over with its own
unwieldy size, must be composed of smaller units, each within itself
a corporation, and governed by a directorate. There are, in the
corporation-organism, different departments and bureaus, subdivisions
of function, which constitute the smaller corporations within the
larger corporation. These subsidiary companies have their own glands
of internal secretion as their directors.

Thus, the growth of the brain is presided over by the adrenal cortex,
the thyroid, the thymus and the pituitary. They determine the size of
the brain, the number of its cells