was as alive and kicking as ever. I suppose he had been
thinking for years concerning some method for the resumption of youth,
for we find him exclaiming, when the opportunity loomed of a great
laboratory on Agassiz Island, Long Island, on one of his recurrent
flights to New York: "Would that I were thirty!" And other passages in
his personal communications refer again and again to his consciousness
of growing old. The miracles that were being performed by injecting
thyroid and feeding thyroid in animals probably acted as the spark to
an inflammable mass of ideas long smouldering in the subcellars of his
mind. The effects were reported to the Society of Biology in Paris,
one memorable evening, June 1, 1889, in two notes on the results of
the hypodermic injection in man of the testis juice of monkeys and
dogs, and certain generalizations deduced therefrom. Such juices, he
stated, had a definite energy-mobilizing or, as he put it, dynamogenic
action upon the subject himself, stimulating amazingly his general
health, muscular power and mental activity.

These experiments, their nature, the manner in which they were
conducted, the character and age of the experimenter, and the results
claimed, were exquisitely good stuff for ridicule. Cartoonists and
reporters leaped upon the theme with the avidity of the true-blue
interviewer. Paris, where to be ridiculed is to be killed in public
with the most ignominious of deaths, reacted as only the French
temperament can react. The wits of the salons crackled, the
bourgeoisie chortled, the proletariat roared. The Elixir of Life had
been discovered and it was excellent sport.

But Brown-Sequard remained unshaken. He had all the roues of Paris
running to him, and consequent charges of quackery and charlatanism.
How much of these unsavory epithets really applied to him will not be
determined until we have a better acquaintance with his more intimate
life. A biography and collection of his letters is needed. But it is
certain that the general principles he arrived at, aided as much by
the wings of intuition as by the clues of incomplete and incompletely
controlled experiments, survive as the foundations of whatever we know
about the internal secretions, and all our present viewpoints. He
summed these up in 1891 as follows:

"All the tissues, in our view, are modifiers of the blood by means of
an internal secretion taken from them by the venous blood. From this
we are forced to the con