impregnation, to prepare a site for its landing and settlement, blood and food for its nutrition, safety for its development.  But it is not to be.  No sperm at hand, or effective enough to penetrate that wandering ovum.  Love’s labour’s lost.  All must return to the so-called normal, really the intermenstrual state.  The womb must surrender some of that blood, the glands return to their routine, and a sex diastole of the whole organism succeeds.  Until again, another follicle swells, another ovum matures, and the premenstrual state of sex high tide cycles back.

Seven to ten days before menstruation we know that sex high tide is beginning for that is when the blood pressure goes up.  As this rise of blood pressure is probably controlled by the posterior pituitary, we have a clue to the reason for the rhythmic variations in the rate of production of its secretion by the ovary.  For, since menstruation is so closely connected with the phases of the moon and the tides, the rhythmicity of the posterior pituitary may be traced to the days when the pineal was an eye at the top of the head, and in direct relation with the pituitary.

Menstruation has been said to be a miniature labor.  It is not that as much as it is a miniature abortion.  It is an effort of nature still-born.  But nature is quite used to its disappointments and returns placidly to the daily grind.  The four phases of a woman’s twenty-eight day cycle succeed each other as the premenstrual, the menstrual, the postmenstrual and the intermenstrual, with the precision of pistons moving in a motor, when no interfering factor as disease, profound emotion or climate disturbances are present, affecting the endocrines.

The sequence of events appears to be about as follows:  The amount of post-pituitary secretion reaches a certain concentration.  This in turn stimulates the thyroid and adrenal medulla.  They in turn activate the ovarian cells, which congest the uterine glands and lining membrane.  The follicle bursts, the ovum is discharged and wanders, the uterus waits and wonders.  Nothing happens, the curtain is lowered, the scenery is removed, the actors revert to civilian clothes.  That is the story of menstruation, the central phenomenon of woman’s pre-pregnancy life.  One sees it clearly as a play of an internal secretion syndicate.

THE PREMENSTRUAL MOLIMINA

The premenstrual molimina is the traditional title accorded symptoms, sensations, feelings, observations of women in the premenstrual phase.  In the light of endocrine analysis, they become exceedingly important indicators of the underlying constitution of the individual concerned.  Indeed, the premenstrual period furnishes a direct clue to the dominating internal secretion in a woman.  Moreover, these premenstrual phenomena are the shadows cast by coming events.  For they mimic and prophesy the events of the last crisis of feminine sex life, the cessation of ovulation which goes by the name of menopause, gonadopause, or change of sex life.  The premenstrual phenomena provide a positive film, so to speak, of the latent negative picture of the endocrine system of the girl or woman.