his health had quite failed, and that indigestion, headaches, with a looming hopeless breakdown of body and mind made his life a burden and a curse.  The twenty years of research he devoted to the problems of evolution were one long torture.  For sixteen more years, during which he worked upon and produced immortal classics of biology, he was the most wretched and unhappy sufferer from neurasthenia.  His life was a continuous alternation of small doses of work and large doses of rest.  So he was enabled to publish twenty-three volumes of original writing and fifty-one scientific papers.  Living a sort of quasi-sanitarium life, with the rules and regulations of one undergoing a rest cure for thirty-six years, he thus accomplished infinitely more than the millions who have led the strenuous life.  That he thus survived, as a genius, among the perils of an intellectual nature in an environment for which his adrenals sentenced him to destruction, must be put down in large measure to the ministrations and good sense of wife and children who supplied him with the endocrine energy he lacked.  All these details I have given in the attempt to analyze the internal secretion constitution of this great man of genius, to establish that he really suffered from inadequate function of his adrenal glands, for the symptoms of chronic though benign adrenal insufficiency coincide in their mass effect with the story of his life.  He was not a good animal, as Herbert Spencer declared was a first sine qua non of the successful life.  He was a poor animal, the poorest of animals, because he possessed poor adrenals.  What saved him was his congenitally superior pituitary (the nidus of genius) and the overacting thyroid, which combined to compensate to some extent for his fundamental lack.  According to his son he rose early because he could not lie in bed, and he would have liked to get up earlier than he did.

What other hints have we that in spite of his fatigue disease he was a pituitocentric?  The record of his physique and physiognomy, documentary and that left in portraits and photographs.  He was tall and thin and his frame was naturally strong and large.  Face was ruddy, and his grey eyes looked out from under deep overhanging brows and bushy eyebrows.  The ears were large and prominent, the hair straight, the nose broad and well developed.  All these are distinctive pituitary traits.  The photograph of him taken by Maull and Fox in 1854 shows his chin to be the square firm kind that goes with the ante-pituitary type physique. (This photo is the frontispiece of the collection of essays entitled “Darwinism and Modern Science,” edited by A.C.  Seward and published in 1909).  Charles Darwin, we may say, then, lived the life of one with a hyperfunctioning pituitary, the anterior portion dominating the posterior, a thyroid excess, and an adrenal much deficient, the combination settling the fate of a grand intellect in an invalid.  It is interesting to note that an extant portrait of Erasmus Darwin, Darwin’s distinguished grandfather, shows a pituitocentric, but with a rounder head and a fatter face, which point to a predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary.  Correspondingly, he was more speculative and poetic intellectually than his grandson, and more irascible and imperious in his moods.