cold climate, which necessitates a more voluminous hair covering for an animal, will evoke a hypertrophy of the adrenal cortex.  Secondarily other effects appear as by-products of the adaptation.  The adrenal cortex makes for pugnacity, temper, animal courage, irritability and anger reactions.  So a hairy animal will, in general (unless other endocrines come in to defeat the primary effect), be more pugnacious, courageous, irritable and combative.  The same applies to woman.  An environment which tends to encourage the masculine traits in her, to arouse repeatedly her pugnacity and combative decisions in the more rapid give and take of the masculine world, will rouse the adrenal cortex to greater activity, and so make her face hirsute, her attitudes aggressive, and perhaps render her sterile.  Concomitantly there may be a disturbance of menstruation.

The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all be donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up of a woman.  When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the ovum may not be able to burst through the ovary, a necessity before it may begin its travels to the uterus.  Next, the propulsive action of the genital ducts may be insufficient because of defective corpus luteum.  Or the uterus may not have received enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to make it fit soil for the ovum to plant itself in.  Or there may be too much of these, which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by gentle contractions and so keep it well-toned.  Excessive massage will throw the ovum out.  All these are factors in the sterility problem, with its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct.

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion.  But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal instinct.  Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it.  There are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced upon every woman.  Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the absurd pose of the theorist desperate to epater le bourgeois or to cover up hidden defects in his or her make-up.

Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality through somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were sane enough, have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedonism.  So that the criminal who was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again, would have to thank his lucky stars for his lighter punishment.  The future, tomorrow, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or if you will, the Republic of Supermen, means to all of us what the child means to the madonna.  The cynical epicurean careerists and careeristinas, and the depraved degenerates of a comfort-lusting civilization may have suffered an absolute atrophy and castration of that instinct.  But they are pathologic specimens, and we are not for the moment concerned with them.