News and Views

Abstract

THE very personal appeal of the problems of the internal secretions is sufficient guarantee that the valuable résumé by the master in this subject which appears as a Supplement to this week's issue of NATURE will be widely read. Both author and subject came into being at about the same time and both have grown and developed side by side. During the eighty odd years of a fruitful scientific life, Sir E. Sharpey-Schafer has not only witnessed the change of view regarding the basis of animal behaviour but also he has played a prominent part in bringing about this broader basis. It is being realised more and more that racial and individual characteristics aro not solely the expressions of an inherited nervous system but are also dependent, though to a lesser degree, on the development and efficiency of the organs of internal secretion. Many unwarrantable assertions appear from time to time regarding the part played by these special glands in the determination of personality, and until further information concerning their variations with age, climate, and habitat are available, such statements must continue to remain of a highly speculative nature. As in all subjects, during the constructive period, some confusion creeps into the nomenclature, but up to the present no better term has been introduced to connote an internal secretion than the word ‘autacoid’ proposed by Schafer to express the drug-like action of such a chemical regulator it is more accurate though less euphonic than the term ‘hormone’ introduced by Starling, which was originally intended to suggest excitation only and would thus exclude depressing autacoids.