g of the medical art is to
neglect the causes and quarrel with the effect.

There are certain general facts which include a good deal of what is
called and treated as disease. Thus, there are two opposite movements of
life to be seen in cities and elsewhere, belonging to races which, from
various persistent causes, are breeding down and tending to run out, and
to races which are breeding up, or accumulating vital capital,--a
descending and an ascending series. Let me give an example of each; and
that I may incidentally remove a common impression about this country as
compared with the Old World, an impression which got tipsy with conceit
and staggered into the attitude of a formal proposition in the work of
Dr. Robert Knox, I will illustrate the downward movement from English
experience, and the upward movement from a family history belonging to
this immediate neighborhood.

Miss Nightingale speaks of "the fact so often seen of a
great-grandmother, who was a tower of physical vigor, descending into a
grandmother perhaps a little less vigorous, but still sound as a bell,
and healthy to the core, into a mother languid and confined to her
carriage and house; and lastly into a daughter sickly and confined to her
bed." So much for the descending English series; now for the ascending
American series.

Something more than one hundred and thirty years ago there graduated at
Harvard College a delicate youth, who lived an invalid life and died at
the age of about fifty. His two children were both of moderate physical
power, and one of them diminutive in stature. The next generation rose
in physical development, and reached eighty years of age and more in some
of its members. The fourth generation was of fair average endowment.
The fifth generation, great-great-grandchildren of the slender invalid,
are several of, them of extraordinary bodily and mental power; large in
stature, formidable alike with their brains and their arms, organized on
a more extensive scale than either of their parents.

This brief account illustrates incidentally the fallacy of the
universal-degeneration theory applied to American life; the same on which
one of our countrymen has lately brought some very forcible facts to bear
in a muscular discussion of which we have heard rather more than is good
for us. But the two series, American and English, ascending and
descending, were adduced with the main purpose of showing the immense
difference of vital end