izens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by
inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleged,
and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity
posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers
and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of
dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas--these, he
said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of
the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted
and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,
light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of
the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured
photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable
ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months
in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes
some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers
subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in
the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official,
culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal
abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former
(we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he
cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity
is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the
wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they
do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which
often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is
that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and
mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements,
lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in
fine, in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun
to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our
public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.
Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy
parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs
unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same
marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause.
Nature, we may rest