ck the ills of genius, without interfering with
its highest evolution and expression. For example, Bernard Shaw, to
take a living man of genius, is pretty visibly a pituitocentric of the
well-balanced variety. He has the height, the facial features, the
hands, and the sort of mentality that run together in his endocrine
make-up. He also has the headaches. It is quite probable that feeding
him pituitary gland extract in the proper dosage would relieve him of
his headaches. A process might be started in his pituitary, however,
that would diminish its extraordinary output which has assisted
to make his brain so brilliant. The possibility, nevertheless,
is excessively remote as the pituitary predominance in him is so
overwhelming, that nothing short of surgery, nature's or the medical
graduate's, could really affect that overmastering eminence. The time
will come, though it is not yet by a long, long road, when we shall
be able to intervene, and perhaps meddle, in nature's most intimate
plans. The right of the power to modify, like the power to kill, will
be defined and limited by common agreement before that goal will be
reached.

CHAPTER XII

APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

The knowledge that the shape and action of a man's body as well as
his mind depend on the internal secretions inspires the hope of the
emergence of a hitherto inconceivable controlling power over human
life in the future. For in the wake of chemical discovery there has
always come chemical control. The nature of chemical research, the
necessity for clear thinking, accurate measurement, and experience
in the actual handling of materials, the fundamental tradition and
technique of the science, have made and will make the practical
applications about which we today may only speculate. What the study
of the internal secretions suffers from, at the beginning of the third
decade of the twentieth century, is insufficient appreciation of its
meaning for mankind. It is true that there are thousands of workers
scattered throughout the world contributing their mites to the general
store. They increase yearly, almost daily, and their achievements,
in spite of an uncritical enthusiasm in some quarters and a
semi-charlatanism in others, have been and continue magnificent. But
they are pecking at a mountain which requires organized, massive,
engineering organization for its blasting.

The crying need is for an international institute, endowed and
equipp