nds, formed during
puberty, but latent until the advent of pregnancy. We know that
injection of corpus luteum will cause an hypertrophy of the breasts.
The same effect is produced regularly during the menstrual period,
with a consciousness of swelling of the breasts. Their atrophy at the
menopause coincides with the shrinkage of the ovaries that takes place
at that period. Activity of the breasts parallels indeed more or less
the activity of the corpus luteum.

With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during pregnancy,
prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secretion of the
post-pituitary would now cause the change from the internal cell
secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing by the placenta.
When the placenta is removed, after labor, the post-pituitary can act,
and a free flow of milk is established. However, to counterbalance
this, and to prevent the post-pituitary from overacting, the breasts
secrete a hormone with an action like that of placenta, but not so
strong, which tends to inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition
of a pregnancy upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother,
infant, and embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and
compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole endocrine
system.

CRITICAL AGES

The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian writer as a
more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when sex function ceases,
the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the age of adolescence is just
as much of a dangerous age as the age of deliquescence. The only
difference between them is that the dangers of the one have been
hushed up, the dangers of the other well boomed and advertised.
Both are dangerous to the individual, because both are periods of
instability and readjustment of the cells, particularly the brain
cells, to a deranged endocrine system and blood chemistry.

Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an effect of
experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures produced
by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene O'Neil's play,
"Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as she is in her youth, when
her ovaries have budded and bloomed for only a few years, and her
other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her
engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because
she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on
his la