inently successful. His wife recalls
Florence Nightingale, in face, figure and conduct (people who are
built alike as regards their internal secretions are those whom we
recognize as similar physically and psychically). She, too, was a
pituito-adrenal, and in so far resembled her husband. But as in a
woman ante-pituitary and adrenal superiority make for masculinity,
she must be classed as a masculinoid type of woman. She was socially
aggressive, and took part in the revolutionary movement of her time in
Ireland. Thus we find that Oscar Wilde was the result of a mating of
internal secretions acting in the same direction. The process might be
compared to parthenogenesis.

It is on record that when enceinte his mother often expressed the
wish that her child be a girl. When a boy was born, she was immensely
disappointed. To compensate for her disappointment, she brought him up
a good deal like a little girl. She had him dressed in girls' clothes
at an age when most boys are violent destroyers of clothing. She would
hang massive jewelry upon him, for the delight of playing with the
resultant stage picture as a satisfaction for her discontented
desires. In the light of modern psychology, and our formulization of
her endocrine status, we must put down her conduct to a suppressed
homosexual craving. Had her son been built along the lines of strong
emphatic masculinity, her influence, though vicious, would probably
have found no congenial soil, and would have died out altogether after
his contacts with the outer world, beginning with school. No matter
how she would have conditioned his vegetative system temporarily,
his internal secretions, released then from compression, would have
asserted themselves and determined his fate differently. However, it
is quite possible that if such had been the case Oscar Wilde, the
aesthete, the paradoxer, the disciple of Walter Pater and Baudelaire,
would have stayed in the land of the to be born. I mean that then
we would not have had Oscar Wilde, but another person, genius or
commonplace, who also might have borne the name of Oscar Wilde.

That was not to be. The singular assortment of endocrines that mingled
their activities to make Oscar Wilde shaped a personality which we
must classify as the thymocentric (thymus-centered). Why this should
be so is an interesting question. Pituito-adrenal plus pituito-adrenal
of his heredity should make two pituito-adrenals according to
elementary arithm