eet with examples of acute
disorder, chronic ailment, general debility, premature decrepitude.
Scarcely is there one to whom you put the question, who has not, in the
course of his life, brought upon himself illness from which a little
knowledge would have saved him. Here is a case of heart disease consequent
on a rheumatic fever that followed a reckless exposure. There is a case of
eyes spoiled for life by overstudy.

"Not to dwell on the natural pain, the gloom, and the waste of time and
money thus entailed, only consider how greatly ill health hinders the
discharge of all duties,--makes business often impossible, and always more
difficult; produces irritability fatal to the right management of
children, puts the functions of citizenship out of the question, and makes
amusement a bore. Is it not clear that the physical sins--partly our
ancestors' and partly our own--which produce this ill health deduct more
from complete living than anything else, and to a great extent make life a
failure and a burden, instead of a benefaction and a pleasure?"--Herbert
Spencer.

[2] The word protoplasm must not be misunderstood to mean a substance of a
definite chemical nature, or of an invariable morphological structure; it
is applied to any part of a cell which shows the properties of life, and
is therefore only a convenient abbreviation for the phrase "mass of living
matter."

[3] "Did we possess some optic aid which should overcome the grossness of
our vision, so that we might watch the dance of atoms in the double
process of making and unmaking in the living body, we should see the
commonplace, lifeless things which are brought by the blood, and which we
call food, caught up into and made part of the molecular whorls of the
living muscle, linked together for a while in the intricate figures of the
dance of life, giving and taking energy as they dance, and then we should
see how, loosing hands, they slipped back into the blood as dead, inert,
used-up matter."--Michael Foster, Professor of Physiology in the
University of Cambridge, England.

[4] "Our material frame is composed of innumerable atoms, and each
separate and individual atom has its birth, life, and death, and then its
removal from the 'place of the living.' Thus there is going on a
continuous process of decay and death among the individual atoms which
make up each tissue. Each tissue preserves its vitality for a limited
space only, is then separated from the tissue