, and they make excuses."

Lytton Strachey has painted superbly all this in his essay. But for us
his most significant passage is the following: "When old age actually
came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited patiently,
played a queer trick upon Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public
spirit of that long life had only been equaled by its acerbity. Her
virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted
usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sacredness
of years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die
as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be
made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The
change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable."

"_There appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould._
The _thin, angular_ woman, with her haughty eye, and her acrid mouth,
had vanished, and in her place was the _rounded, bulky form_ of a _fat
old lady_, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible.
The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was, indeed,
literally growing soft. Senility--an ever more and more amiable
senility--descended."

We have here an absolutely typical pituitary history, with another
case of pituitocentric natural ability. What happens when pituitary
hyperfunction or superiority becomes underfunction or inferiority is
precisely as Strachey has described so cleverly of the "ministering
angel": the acrid, thin and keen degenerate every time into the
amiable, fat and dull. Just as Napoleon was transformed by the
mutations of his pituitary, so was the Saint with the Lamp. And in
both instances the contrasting modifications, from one extreme of
glandular function to the other, supply us with the clue to the secret
hand of their inner being and becoming, which worked upon the twists
and turns of circumstance about them as a sculptor upon clay.

The official biography by Sir Edward Cook contains three portraits,
representing three different stages, which bear out the pituitocentric
thesis of her personality and life history. One as she was at 25, and
pictured by Mrs. Gaskell: "She is tall; very straight and willowy in
figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion
... perfect teeth ... perfect grace and lovely appearance ... she is
so like a saint." The face is long and oval, of the post-pituitary
kind. Then gradually the ante-pituitary ga