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the word hysterical in the broad sense of meaning mental or nervous maladjustment.

There is no doubt at all that the nervous system is, in a sense, the general manager of the body. But we must not, in our practise on a basis of this understanding, get ahead of our knowledge. In most matters of medicine and human biology our practise lags behind our knowledge, but in this matter of the influence of mind over body we rush ahead, in our proposed therapeutic measures, of our fundamental understanding of this influence.

VI

I have spoken of the nervous system as being the general manager of the other body systems. But modern biological knowledge is revealing that there is another general manager of the body, one that even manages, in some degree, the nervous system. This is the system of ductless glands, the thymus, the thyroid and parathyroids, the pituitary, the adrenals, the pancreas, and the gonads. Some of these glands are very small in size, as the parathyroids and the pituitary, and their secretions are very small in quantity, but they have an extraordinary influence on body growth and development and on its metabolism in general. These secretions, called hormones ("excitants"), have very powerful effects.

Nearly three tons of fresh thyroid gland tissue have to be used to get one ounce of thyroxin, the hormone secreted by the thyroid. But if there is too little thyroxin secreted into the blood by the thyroid gland of a child, this whole gland weighing hardly more than an ounce, that child may become a cretin, with not only dreadful physical deformity but with the deformed or incomplete mind of an idiot. If there is a little too much the child may have a goiter, protruding eye-balls, a too rapid heart, and a restless, irritable brain. The pituitary gland weighs one-sixtieth of an ounce, but if it is removed death ensues. If its secretions are too small in amount during childhood, growth is inhibited and a dwarf is produced, usually with psychic derangements; if too large in amount, giantism occurs, often with accompanying imbecility. The secretions (called adrenaline) of the adrenal

glands, two small bodies lying near the kidneys and weighing about one-seventh of an ounce each, have a marked effect on our nervous system, revealed by strong emotional responses to the variation in the amount of the secretions.

The bio-chemists have succeeded in extracting and isolating the basic or active element in the secretions of some of these glands, as thyroxin from the thyroid, adrenaline from the adrenal glands, and insulin from the pancreas, and these extracted elements are now used in medical practice. A large new field in therapeutics has thus been opened, and work in it is being feverishly carried on.

These hormones, small in quantity but powerful and important in effect, remind us of the vitamines, accessory food elements small in quantity but powerful in effect, contained in various vegetable and animal substances used for food, as green leaves, milk, certain fats and carbohydrates, etc. An insufficient supply of these vitamines, of which three or four different ones have been so far recognized-although no one of them has been yet chemically isolated-in our dietary, produces various irregularities in growth and metabolism which may take on the character of specific diseases, as scurvy, beri-beri, rickets and other malnutritional disorders.

This cursory consideration of the great influence which small quantities of certain chemical substances have on the body's structure and functions brings us back again to the reference made at the very beginning of this article to the encroachment that the chemists are making in the general field of biology. As Slosson has said in a recent paper, chemistry is continually gaining ground from biology. Vast areas, which biologists once claimed but had neglected, have now gone over to the chemists. In fact, it seems that whenever a vital process or product has been thoroughly studied and understood, it is found to belong to physics or chemistry. Consequently, the chemist is inclined to regard biology as merely an unexplored province of chemistry.

But after all there is more to the life of organisms than just chemistry. Organisms live and do things and have elaborate relations with each other and with all of Nature. It is indeed this, rather than the chemical constitution and the physical

organization of their tissues and parts, that makes them so interesting. The internal dynamic phenomena of living things may be gradually more and more analyzed into phenomena of chemistry and physics. But the external relations of organisms to their environment and especially to other organisms of the same and different kinds are more than physico-chemical phenomena.

When we come to man it is precisely this relation of human individuals to other living individuals, plant, animal and human, which attracts our keenest interest. It is the biologist's contribution to the subjects of health, heredity, evolution and such major determinants of the fate of human individuals and human society that gives biology its chief importance in the eyes of the general public. Indeed, the biologists themselves find these subjects of study most attractive. The more they study them and the more precise knowledge they acquire about them, and make known to the public, the more the world will realize and pay attention to the significance of biology in everyday life.

VERNON KELLOGG.

CAN WE CONTROL THE BUSINESS CYCLE?

BY ARTHUR BULLARD

THE present discussion of "inflation", the rumor that the Federal Reserve Board may raise the discount rate, such articles as Are There Any Clouds on the Business Skies? by Mr. Branting in The Magazine of Wall Street, all give added interest to the Report on Business Cycles and Unemployment which has recently come from the Government Printing Office. The violent fluctuations from intense industrial activity to the utter depression of "hard times" is of course exceedingly costly to the business community but the effects are at once more widespread and very much more tragic to the wage-earners.

In the midst of the last crisis of unemployment, when the breadwinners of more than four million families were out of work, a committee Owen D. Young, Chairman of the Board of the General Electric Company, Chairman; Joseph H. Defrees, former President of the United States Chamber of Commerce; Mary Van Kleeck, of the Russell Sage Foundation; Matthew Woll, Vice-President of the American Federation of Labor; Clarence M. Woolley, President of the American Radiator Company; Edward Eyre Hunt, Secretary of the President's Conference on Unemployment, Secretary-was appointed by the President's Conference on Unemployment to consider “certain suggestions for controlling extremes of the business cycle so as to lessen the losses due to recurrent periods of unemployment" and to make "a thorough study of the business phenomena of booms and slumps" with a view "to advance public knowledge and stimulate thought towards constructive solution."

The committee agreed on certain recommendations of which the chief was to invite attention to and discussion of the problem. Events have played into their hands. Few subjects are being more earnestly discussed in business circles today. Production is increasingly active, wages are on the rise, prices are mounting. Nothing is of more immediate concern to the banker, the manu

facturer, the merchant, than a correct estimate of future trend. How long is this burst of prosperity to last? Is it growing soundly? Or are we riding for a fall? Is there any way to safeguard our gains-to hold our present high level over a long period or are we doomed to a brief spurt of over-expansion, to gambling instead of creating-doomed to high pressure inflations till the boiler bursts? These are just the questions the committee asks us to discuss.

What is the Business Cycle? There is a whole chapter on this subject by Wesley C. Mitchell in the supplementary volume prepared for the committee by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is well worth reading to any one especially interested in the subject, but the matter is more succinctly stated by Mr. Hoover in the Foreword to the Report:

Broadly, the business cycle is a constant recurrence of irregularly separated booms and slumps. The general conclusion of the Committee is that as the slumps are in the main due to the wastes, extravagance, speculation, inflation, over-expansion, and inefficiency in production developed during the booms, the strategic point of attack, therefore, is the reduction of these evils, mainly through the provision for such current economic information as will show the signs of danger, and its more general understanding and use by producers, distributors, and banks, inducing more constructive and safer policies.

There is no suggestion of regular time intervals between the peaks and troughs of the Business Cycle. It is in no way connected with the "seventeen year locusts" or other pests, which are popularly supposed to return with regularity. In the 110 years for which we have statistics, there have been fifteen slumps, but sometimes they have been seventeen years apart, sometimes only three. The curve of business activity in our history is as angular and irregular as one of Jove's thunderbolts.

Everything the economists have to say about the Business Cycle they wrap around with qualifying phrases. The causes of these irregular movements in "prosperity" are evidently exceedingly complex. It is only recently that the subject has begun to be studied statistically. There are still people who attribute "hard times" to sun spots. New factors which affect the curve are constantly being discovered and on many factors of known effect the figures are not yet available.

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