nuous life. That he thus survived, as a
genius, among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment
for which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put down
in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of wife and
children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he lacked. All
these details I have given in the attempt to analyze the internal
secretion constitution of this great man of genius, to establish that
he really suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for
the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide
in their mass effect with the story of his life. He was not a good
animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the
successful life. He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because
he possessed poor adrenals. What saved him was his congenitally
superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid,
which combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack.
According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in bed,
and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did.

What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was
a pituitocentric? The record of his physique and physiognomy,
documentary and that left in portraits and photographs. He was tall
and thin and his frame was naturally strong and large. Face was ruddy,
and his grey eyes looked out from under deep overhanging brows and
bushy eyebrows. The ears were large and prominent, the hair straight,
the nose broad and well developed. All these are distinctive pituitary
traits. The photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his
chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary type
physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of essays
entitled "Darwinism and Modern Science," edited by A.C. Seward and
published in 1909). Charles Darwin, we may say, then, lived the
life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, the anterior portion
dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, and an adrenal much
deficient, the combination settling the fate of a grand intellect
in an invalid. It is interesting to note that an extant portrait
of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's distinguished grandfather, shows a
pituitocentric, but with a rounder head and a fatter face, which point
to a predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary.
Correspondingly, he was more speculative and poetic intellec