he 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 endowments in different strains of blood; a
difference to which all ordinary medication is in all probability a
matter of comparatively trivial purport. Many affections which art has
to strive against might be easily shown to be vital to the well-being of
society. Hydrocephalus, tabes mesenterica, and other similar maladies,
are natural agencies which cut off the children of races that are
sinking below the decent minimum which nature has established as the
condition of viability, before they reach the age of reproduction.
They are really not so much diseases, as manifestations of congenital
incapacity for life; the race would be ruined if art could ever learn
always to preserve the individuals subject to them. We must do the best
we can for them, but we ought also to know what these "diseases" mean.

Again, invalidism is the normal state of many organizations. It can
be changed to disease, but never to absolute health by medicinal
appliances. There are many ladies, ancient and recent, who are
perpetually taking remedies for irremediable pains and aches. They ought
to have headaches and back-aches and stomach-aches; they are not well if
they do not have them. To expect them to live without frequent twinges
is like expecting a doctor's old chaise to go without creaking; if it
did, we might be sure the springs were broken. There is no doubt that
the constant demand for medicinal remedies from patients of this class
leads to their over-use; often in the case of cathartics, sometimes in
that of opiates. I have been told by an intelligent practitioner in
a Western town, that the constant prescription of opiates by certain
physicians in his vicinity has rendered the habitual use