If the process involving the adrenal cortex attacks it after birth, the symmetrical correspondence and harmony of the primary sex organs and the secondary sex characters are not affected.  But there follows a curious hastening of the ripening of body and mind summed up in the word puberty, a precocious puberty, with the most startling effects.  A little girl of 2, 3, or 4 years of age perhaps will come to exhibit the growth and appearance of a girl of 14.  She begins to menstruate, her breasts swell, she shoots up in height and weight, sprouts the hair distribution of the adult, and the mentality of the adolescent, restless, acquiring, doubting, emerge.  A tot bewitched into puberty!  A boy of six or seven may suddenly, in the course of a few weeks or months, become a little man, robust, rather short and stocky, but moustached, with the muscular strength and sexual powers of a man and thinking as a man.  It is all as if into some fermentable medium or solution a little yeast were dropped that changed the quiet calm of its surface into a bubbling, effervescing revolution.  It suggests at once that maturation, the transformation of the child into the man or woman, must be due to the pouring into the blood and the body fluids of some substance which acts like the yeast in the fermentable solution.  The adrenal cortex is one source of the maturity-producing internal secretions.

If trouble in the adrenal cortex starts after puberty, phenomena of the same type, but of a different order, exhibit themselves.  A woman, say in the thirties, becomes thus afflicted.  Slowly or quickly her body will be covered by an abundant growth of hair, more or less of a beard and moustache appear upon the face, her voice will become deep and penetrating, her muscles will harden, and she will show a capacity for hard physical labor.  Sexually she appears to be made over, masculinity now predominates in her make-up.  Virilism is the name by which the French in particular have popularized the knowledge of the condition.  Virilists have to shave or be shaved regularly and are not bothered in the least by the cares, responsibilities, jealousies and anxieties of personal beauty, for the change in their spirituality makes them immune to the preoccupations of the feminine.  The cause of such a transformation in a previously entirely normal woman has been found to be a tumor of the adrenal cortex.

But not only is sexuality, and the conduct of the secondary sex characters, connected with the adventures of the adrenal cortex.  The development of the master tissues of the body, the brain, the pride and darling of evolution, is in some subtle way correlated with it.  The adrenal cortex contains more of the phosphorus-containing substances of the general nature of those found in the central nervous system than any other gland or non-nervous tissues in the body.  During human intrauterine life the adrenal glands are large and conspicuous, in the first half of the second month being twice as large as the kidneys.