on of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are
known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed and diseased
bones of tertiary mammalia have been collected in the caverns of
Gailenreuth with traces of healing."]

But it is especially the prerogative, I had almost said privilege, of
educated and domesticated beings, from man down to the potato, serving
to teach them, and such as train them, the laws of life, and to get rid
of those who will not mind or cannot be kept subject to these laws.

Disease, being always an effect, is always in exact proportion to the
sum of its causes, as much in the case of Spigelius, who dies of a
scratch, as in that of the man who recovers after an iron bar has been
shot through his brain. The one prevalent failing 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. T