If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or competitive, then woe betide the victim.  With their nervous dispositions, it is the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child.  From school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they wander in search of an education.  Educational cults by the dozen have sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.

The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an insufficiently developed adrenal cortex.  That means an insufficiently developed brain and nervous system.  For we have seen how closely all these are related in development.  Now education can never be the education of a vacuum.  And we have to deal here with a relative vacuum.  When there are no potentialities, there can be no education.  Where the potentialities are limited, education must be limited.  The congenital adrenal inadequate is defined in physical and mental energy.  Hence educators cannot drive him.  Up to a certain point he can be led, but no farther.  He should not be expected to go to a college, and waste the opportunity of some one financially unlucky, but whose endocrine system is more generously endowed.

Not that the outlook is absolutely hopeless.  Puberty, with its tremendous changes in the glands of internal secretion, when one can almost hear the clicks and the whirring of the wheels in the internal machinery, may transform.  The unfathomed possibilities of gland therapy are still to be probed.  But the general rule remains.

THE REACTIONS TO MODERNISM

The adrenal personalities in all their variations must be safeguarded and carefully looked after in the strained complexities of modern post-bellum civilization.  In a sense, the adrenal type is the Atlas of the twentieth century world, and small wonder that he and his descendants stagger beneath the burden.  The adrenals are organs for the mobilization of energy, physical and mental, for emergencies.  They are the glands which meet shocks and neutralize the effects of shock.  In the solitary animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds.  The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation.  Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation.  In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate.  Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise Providence, relieved and shielded the adrenals, and acted as valuable adjuvants for the preservation of normality.

The nineteenth century witnessed the birth and expansion of a great number of new stimulant reagents, the discoveries of physics and chemistry, which, with the climax of the World War of 1914-1918, have made for a more or less complete deliquescence of accepted religion.  For the great majority there was no faith to take its place.  War, pre-war, and post-war shocks have continued with their incessant pounding upon the reserves of energy.  Under these conditions the adrenal personalities are bound to suffer.  The other endocrine types suffer, too, but quite differently.