The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex tide, may be summed up something like this: 

The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage battery atrophies when it dries up.  An important member of the endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement of gland activities, a new regime, becomes necessary.  If a balance of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens.  Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence.  But if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and their psychic echoes, come.  Anterior pituitary control will mean a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive attitudes.  Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria, may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor.  Sooner or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.

With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also exhibit its particular flare.  If there is thyroid excess the woman will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of mood and temperament.  The adrenal centered will have a high blood pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability.  So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution of the woman.  When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been completed.

Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman.  The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five.  Here enters upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male.  Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without the poisoning effects.  Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the uterus.  Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative of the uterus.  Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs.  Its secretion has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells.  The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric.  Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness, despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is disease or disturbance of it.  The influence of the prostate upon man’s mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains to be investigated in detail.