[kaskas (OP)]

As usual I was going through some biomed publications and while looking for a nice definitive book on hormone function, stumbled across an ebook-version of an old 1922 book on hormones, at Project Gutenberg.

The Glands Regulating Personality, by Louis Berman, M.D.

Reading the first pages, was at first gasping at the text, then recalled I thought this was an anatomy book, basically. What an introduction! I thought this was worth sharing. It is easy to find on Gutenberg. Here are some quotes. Now post yours?

Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime. When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba, protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.

Throughout the living world, from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the infectious diseases which kill man.

Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for some line of achievement may make him more effective.