Hi, Sunblok!

As one of the fair skinned, thank you for doing signal service in the fight against alligator skin among the elderly. ;)

The kidneys couldn't possibly be hormone glands because they are filtering organs, not chemical factory organs. They don't secrete anything; they excrete. Maybe you were thinking of the adrenal glands, that sit on top of the kidneys.

The liver does secrete bile, but not, as a rule, directly into the bloodstream the way that the real endocrine glands do. The bile duct and gall bladder control the flow. And bile doesn't produce a chemical response in the organism so much as it affects a single organic process, i.e., digestion. Hormones affect the whole organism, not just a single process, though some effects are short-term (like the fight or flight response prompted by adrenline) and others are long-term (like sexual maturation prompted by estrogen and testosterone).

I'm not sure exactly what you've been getting at. Could you explain a little more, please?

Thanks--
Mary Anne