The years 1855-56 are red-letter years in the history of the glands of internal secretion. They witnessed, not only the publication of Claude Bernard's "Lectures on Experimental Physiology," but also the appearance of a monograph by Thomas Addison, an English physician, entitled "On the constitutional and local effects of disease of the suprarenal bodies." In this, he described a fatal disease during which the individual affected became languid and weak, and developed a dingy or smoky discoloration of the whole surface of the body, a browning or bronzing of the skin, caused generally by destructive tuberculous disease of the suprarenal or adrenal bodies. Addison promptly put down these constitutional effects of loss of the adrenal bodies to loss of something produced by them of constitutional importance. He was particularly struck by the change in the pigmentation of the skin, so much so that his own designation for the affection was "bronzed skin." Since then, however, the condition has been universally styled Addison's Disease. There is something spectacularly mysterious and picturesque about most of the malign, insidious effects of the disease which appealed at once to a number of investigators. The most adventurous, the most daring, the most imbued with enthusiasm for the experimental method, was the American Frenchman, Brown-Séquard, who is acknowledged the father of modern knowledge of the glands of internal secretion, though to Claude Bernard belong the honors of the grandfather. BROWN-SÉQUARD THE GREAT Brown-Séquard, as the outstanding figure in the history of the glands of internal secretion, deserves some notice as a personality. In the words of the note-makers for novels and plays, he was a card. He was born in 1817 at Port-Louis, on the island of Mauritius, off Africa, then French property. His father was a Mr. Brown, an American sea captain; his mother a Mme. Séquard, a Frenchwoman. Early in childhood, the father sailed away on one of his voyages and never came back. The mother thereafter supported herself and her son sewing embroideries. At fifteen, Brown-Séquard, with the physical appearance of an Indian Creole, was clerking in a colonial store by day, and composing poetry, romances and plays by night. The call of Paris was in his blood, which was indeed a supersaturated solution of wanderlust. Soon he was landed there to make his fortune in literature, only too speedily to be disillusioned. Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into business. He would have none of either and studied medicine instead, earning his way by teaching as he learned. In the laboratories, he made the acquaintance of people who more than once were to be his salvation in the ups and downs of his career. In 1848 he was one of the secretaries of the Society of Biology, newly founded by Claude Bernard.