econdarily
other effects appear as by-products of the adaptation. The adrenal
cortex makes for pugnacity, temper, animal courage, irritability and
anger reactions. So a hairy animal will, in general (unless other
endocrines come in to defeat the primary effect), be more pugnacious,
courageous, irritable and combative. The same applies to woman. An
environment which tends to encourage the masculine traits in her, to
arouse repeatedly her pugnacity and combative decisions in the more
rapid give and take of the masculine world, will rouse the adrenal
cortex to greater activity, and so make her face hirsute, her
attitudes aggressive, and perhaps render her sterile. Concomitantly
there may be a disturbance of menstruation.

The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always
present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all be
donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up of a
woman. When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the ovum may not be
able to burst through the ovary, a necessity before it may begin its
travels to the uterus. Next, the propulsive action of the genital
ducts may be insufficient because of defective corpus luteum. Or the
uterus may not have received enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to
make it fit soil for the ovum to plant itself in. Or there may be
too much of these, which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by
gentle contractions and so keep it well-toned. Excessive massage will
throw the ovum out. All these are factors in the sterility problem,
with its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct.

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics
of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no
poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal
instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will
perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There
are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced
upon every woman. Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the
absurd pose of the theorist desperate to epater le bourgeois or to
cover up hidden defects in his or her make-up.

Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality through
somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were sane enough,
have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedonism. So that the
criminal who was condemned to r