The ovaries are a most important factor in the regulation of the power of the organism to keep lime in the bones.  If they over-secrete in an excess which cannot be taken care of by the other glands of internal secretion, the body loses lime, a softening and curving of the bones occurs, and the most horrible deformities and tortures for the sufferer.  Taking out the ovaries has cured some of the afflicted.  Administration of the antagonizing gland extracts has helped others.  An Italian, Bossi, in 1907, used adrenal gland curatively.  More recently, a British student of the subject, Blair Bell, was given the direction of the treatment, at long range, of a number of cases in India, the land of chronic pregnancy with insufficient food, and consequent oversecretion of the ovaries, with the typical softening of the bones.  At his suggestion pituitary was used successfully.

Some of the glands of internal secretion act as accelerators to the sex glands.  Others act as retarding antagonists.  Among the most important of the latter is

THE THYMUS

The thymus is the gland which dominates childhood.  It appears to do so by inhibiting the activity of the testes or ovaries.  Castration causes a persistent growth and retarded atrophy of the thymus.  Removal of the thymus hastens the development of the gonads.

Situated in the chest, astride the windpipe, it descends and covers over the upper portion of the heart, overlapping the great vessels at the base of the heart.  It is a brownish red mass, which when cut presents the spongy effect of a sweetbread.  The more intimate view of detail revealed by the higher powers of the microscope shows conglomerations of the white cells of the blood known as lymphocytes.  But scattered through the substance of the gland, between these lymphocytes, like the interstitial cells of the sex glands placed between the sex cells, are peculiarly staining cells in whorls.  Of which there are many more in the thymus of embryonic and early postnatal life, known after their discoverer as Hassal’s Corpuscles.  They are believed by some to elaborate the specific internal secretion of the thymus.  Present in all vertebrates, there seems to be more of it in the carnivora than in the herbivora, like the thyroid.

Concerning the exact function of the thymus, we are a good deal at sea.  The latest opinion about the results of extirpation even in young and growing animals is that they are nil.  Yet there is a certain justification for proclaiming the thymus the gland of childhood, the gland which keeps children childish and sometimes makes children out of grown-ups.  There is a quantity of data for that proposition.  In the first place, the curve of rise of growth of the gland seems to coincide with the period of childhood, the curve of its decline with the period of adolescence and the rise of the sex glands.  In the past, it was accepted, that with puberty the thymus atrophied