SECONDARY SEX CHARACTERISTICS AND THE INTERSTITIAL GLAND

Abstract

One of the themes of discussion was the relationship of the secondary sex characteristics and the interstitial gland, of which a brief account is given here. The chief interest of the symposium centered in a lecture by Bouin and Ancel, who are, as everybody knows, the originators of the widely discussed theory of the interstitial gland. The aim of previous researches of Bouin and Ancel, on domestic animals, and that of their younger fellow-workers on wild animals, birds, batrachians and fishes, has been to determine what part of the testes elaborates the hormone which controls, as generally agreed upon now, the secondary sex characteristics. In domestics mammals having a continual sexual activity the sex characteristics remain unchanged or can even develop in the absence of the seminal cells. The latter can be absent in abdominal cryptorchids, or one can cause them to degenerate by ligation of ductus deferens, exposure to x-rays, transplantation, etc., so that in the end there remain only the Sertolian an...