According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of interpretation from a new standpoint.  If human life, in its essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a number of illustrations of their power and influence.  What is the evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, “the introduction into the economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a cunningly contrived torpedo, shall find its way to some particular group of living elements, and cause an explosion among them, leaving the rest untouched,” and the multiplication of such cunningly contrived mechanisms, were responsible for those personalities, magnificent chemical compounds, with whose adventures historians are concerned?

THE CASE OF NAPOLEON

As a unique will and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First must be classed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race.  H.G.  Wells has called his career the “raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time.”  “The figure of an adventurer and wrecker.”  “This saturnine egotist.”  “Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?” “This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar.”  There are other opinions.  The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions.  Napoleona bring fortunes today.  Interest in the man as a man has multiplied with every year.  And certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality in its most exaggerated form.

In the second place he belongs among the moderns.  Modern science and methods of observation have had their chance at him, and have left a conscious record of their results.  Napoleon was the central figure of his time, and was watched by trained medical eyes during his life, and after his death.  Protocols of the examination of his body are accessible, and Napoleonic specimens, preserved by fixing agents, may still be viewed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, England.  Dr. Leonard Guthrie has worked up the material at hand in a report which he presented to the historical section of the International Congress of Medicine, in London in 1913.  I propose to relate his findings to some other facts and the general principles roughly sketched in this book.