scientific thought in general.  His most brilliant ideas came to him in flashes and gleams.  That is why so much of his work has come down to us in the form of aphorisms and paragraphs.  He was, essentially, a poet among the metaphysicians, which again favors the conception of him as a pituitary-centered with a dominant post-pituitary.  Yet his incisive critical faculty, as well as his love of music, also document the supernormal ante-pituitary.

To sum up, the physique and physiognomy of Nietzsche, his migraine attacks and the later fate which overtook him, his likes and dislikes, his tastes, abilities and accomplishments followed from his composition as one pituitary-centered, with post-pituitary domination, a superior thyroid, and inferior adrenals.

DARWIN AS A NEURASTHENIC GENIUS

Charles Darwin, as the author of the “Origin of Species” and the greatest revolutionist of the nineteenth century, has naturally had a great deal of attention paid to his life and personality.  Yet not until the publication of his Autobiography and his son’s Reminiscences was it generally known that he suffered from chronic ill health for most of his adult life.  Dr. W.A.  Johnston, in an article in the American Anthropologist, 1901, has marshalled a number of available facts, to sustain his thesis that Darwin was a victim of neurasthenia.  Now neurasthenia, it is now accepted, is simply a waste-basket word, corresponding to the class miscellaneous in a classification of any group of real objects.  And, as has been emphasized in preceding chapters, most neurasthenia rises upon a disturbed endocrine foundation, most often, an insufficiency of the adrenals.  That is, a defect in the chain of co-operation, balance and compensation among the internal secretions is the basis for the weakness of the nervous system the term neurasthenia is supposed to explain, actually only names.  Darwin’s case was pretty certainly that.

There can be no doubt that Darwin had an abnormal fatigability, a lack of stamina and endurance in mental as well as physical application which plagued him from the late twenties to the sixties.  As a child, he was strong and healthy, fond of outdoors, and though underrated by his teachers, noted to be possessed of intense curiosity, especially concerning natural objects.  At school he was a fleet runner and cultivated a habit of long walks.  Then he was surely no neurasthenic.  Three years which, he himself afterwards said, were worse than wasted, at Cambridge, were filled with shooting, riding and hunting.  His good health lasted until the time he probably stopped growing at 21 or 22.  Thereafter his troubles began.