smissed as curious nonentities, of no real significance
to the running of the body. Laennec, the French founder of the Art of
Diagnosis in Medicine, once said that nothing about a science is more
interesting than the progress of that science itself. He might have
added that nothing either was more interesting than the contradictions
in that progress. For while these grand moguls of their sciences were
enunciating their dogmas, pioneers here and there were already setting
the mines that were to explode them.

The experimental method, to the value of which biologists were
just beginning to awaken, was destined to be the vehicle of Time's
revenges. An application of it to the mysteries of sex was the
immediate occasion. Sex and sex differences have always more or less
obsessed the imagination of mankind. The volumes of theories about
them would constitute a respectable museum. Certain gross facts,
however, were known. The effects of loss of the sex glands upon the
configuration of the body and the predominating constitution in
animals and eunuchs have always attracted attention. The proverbs and
stories of all nations are full of references to them. But up to the
nineteenth century no controlled experimental work was ever carried
out regarding them. It was in 1849, that A.A. Berthold of Goettingen, a
quiet, sedate lecturer, carried out the pioneer experiment of removing
the testes of four roosters and transplanting them under the skin. It
was Berthold's idea to test whether a gland with a definite external
secretion, and a duct through which that secretion was expelled,
but which yet had powers over the body as a whole that were to be
attributed only to an internal secretion, could not be shown, by
a clean-cut experiment, to possess such an internal secretion. He
succeeded perfectly. For he found that, though, in thus separating the
gland from its duct and so cutting off its external secretion, the
action of the cells manufacturing that secretion was destroyed, the
general effects upon the body were not those of castration. The
animals retained their male characteristics as regards voice,
reproductive instinct, fighting spirit and growth of comb and wattles.
Whereas if the glands were entirely removed, these male traits,
peculiar to the rooster, were completely lost. The inference was the
existence of an internal secretion.

To Berthold belongs the honor of being the first experimental
demonstrator who proved the reality