After 1872, when Charles Darwin was sixty-three years old, a marked change for the better occurred in his health.  For the last ten years of his life the condition of his health was a cause of satisfaction and hope to his family.  “He was able to work more steadily with less fatigue and distress afterwards.”  This is probably to be explained as following the gonadopause hi him—­the cessation of activity of the interstitial cells.  After this event, the adrenals in the male nearly always function more efficiently, and well being is improved even though the blood pressure often rises coincidently.  In the relative vigor of that decade we have another bit of evidence that the adrenals had much to say over Darwin’s life.

EPILEPTIC GENIUS

  He had a fever when he was in Spain
  And, when the fit was on him, I did mark
  How he did shake:  ’tis true, this god did shake
  His coward lips did from their color fly;
  And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world,
  Did lose his lustre:  I did hear him groan.

  —­Julius Caesar.

Epilepsy, the “falling sickness” or “fits,” is generally associated with a deterioration or degeneration of mentality, and an inferior personality is frequently an ingredient.  Progressively increasing data accumulate to incriminate more and more a disturbance of the endocrine balance, on the side of multiple deficiencies, as the basic mechanism at the bottom of a good many of them.  Concurrent studies reveal that abnormalities of the thyroid, the parathyroids, the ovaries and testes, and even the thymus exist behind the attack.  Investigation of the content of the consciousness of the different kinds of epilepsies from this point of view will doubtless bring to light some interesting information.  There is much to be done for the epileptic with this new method of approach.

Epilepsy, just the same, may occur in men gifted with the sort of transcendent ability called genius.  Mohammed, Lord Byron, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, to name a few cases, are famous instances.  The point to be settled is whether epileptic genius, that is epilepsy with superior ability, occurs most often in pituitocentrics, the epilepsy being symptomatic of a pituitary struggling against barriers, tugging against bonds.  As mentioned, in such cases epilepsy appears as the twin brother of migraine in genius.  Should that be established, we should have more evidence for the pituitary dominance of most specimens of intellectual power.  As a case in point let us take the most famous of the epileptic geniuses—­Julius Caesar, “When the fit was on I marked how he did shake; tis true, this god did shake.”