cts. And, as has been emphasized in preceding
chapters, most neurasthenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine
foundation, most often, an insufficiency of the adrenals. That is, a
defect in the chain of co-operation, balance and compensation among
the internal secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous
system the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only
names. Darwin's case was pretty certainly that.

There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatigability, a lack
of stamina and endurance in mental as well as physical application
which plagued him from the late twenties to the sixties. As a child,
he was strong and healthy, fond of outdoors, and though underrated by
his teachers, noted to be possessed of intense curiosity, especially
concerning natural objects. At school he was a fleet runner and
cultivated a habit of long walks. Then he was surely no neurasthenic.
Three years which, he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted,
at Cambridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting. His good
health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 22.
Thereafter his troubles began.

What was Darwin, so far as his endocrine composition was concerned?
In the first place his father was a variety of pituitocentric, of the
post-pituitary inferior type, six feet two inches tall, exceedingly
corpulent, and, in the eyes of his son, the sharpest of observers and
the most sympathetic of men. He wished to make a physician out of his
son in order to carry on the medical tradition of the family: Erasmus
Darwin was a physician before him. His son, however, showed no
inclination for so learned and confining a profession and had to
be reproached by his father in these immortal words: "You care for
nothing but shooting dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a
disgrace to yourself and all your family."

Cambridge came after Edinburgh, as he was rushed from medicine into
the clergy. But in vain. A friendship struck up with a naturalist,
Henslow, settled his career for him. Henslow heard of a trip of
general exploration the ship _Beagle_ was to take and recommended
Darwin as naturalist. The captain at first would not hear of the
proposal because of Darwin's nose, a typical pituitary proboscis. But
his prejudices were overcome, and Darwin sailed.

It was upon this voyage that Darwin made himself the greatest
naturalist of all time, and at the same time infected himself with
the virus