its meaning for mankind.  It is true that there are thousands of workers scattered throughout the world contributing their mites to the general store.  They increase yearly, almost daily, and their achievements, in spite of an uncritical enthusiasm in some quarters and a semi-charlatanism in others, have been and continue magnificent.  But they are pecking at a mountain which requires organized, massive, engineering organization for its blasting.

The crying need is for an international institute, endowed and equipped for investigation upon the proper scale, with all the available appliances and methods already worked out and at hand.  Such an institution would possess the right chemical laboratories for the making of blood analyses, metabolism examinations, and tests of endocrine functions.  There would be X-ray machines and experts to radiograph the pituitary, pineal and thymus glands when possible.  There would be psychologists to carry out intelligence tests, determine emotional reactions, and group mental aberrations, deficiencies and defectives.  There would be statisticians, trained in biometrics, to criticize and compare data obtained.  There would be anthropoligists to note and measure variations in angles and curves, ratios and quotients of the external conformation of the body.  Internists would record the history and status of the organs and viscera.  There would be librarians to collect, abstract and collate the vast, accumulating literature.  In short, the mystery of personality, the most marvelous, complex, and variable process in the universe, would be attacked and at length penetrated systematically and persistently, with the ideal of absolute control of its composition as the goal in view.

The nature of the researches?  They would be infinite in their variety and significance.  Their practical by-products, dropped in the pursuit of knowledge by the scientist, as Atalanta’s lover the golden apples in his race, to assuage the scent of the hard-headed business man, would be profitable enough for any country in peace or war, to pay for itself ten times over and at compound interest.  A volume could be filled with suggestions for interesting and promising investigations.  But we may glance at some of the immediately useful aspects that might exercise those concerned with the everyday life of men, women and children.

THE ENDOCRINE EPOCHS OF LIFE

There is no more famous classifications of the epochs of life that mark off the milestones of the individual’s evolution than Shakespeare’s Seven Ages.  So different is he at those different stages of his development, so changed his body and mind that it has become a part of popular physiology that we are entirely made over every seven years, and that no cell in the organism lasts longer than that.  The tradition certainly does not apply to the brain and nervous system, for the number of brain cells is fixed at birth, and cannot be increased, only decreased, because they are too highly specialized to reproduce themselves.