Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/75

Rh Death, formerly the end of health, is nowadays the end of a disease.

Dying a natural death is one of the lost arts.

There seems to be a strange fatum in the association of astronomy with humbug: formerly in horoscopes, and now in patent-medicine almanacs.

A patent-medicine man is generally the patentee of a device for selling whisky under a new name.

A "chronic disease," properly speaking, is nothing but Nature's protest against a chronic provocation. To say that chronic complaints end only with death, means, in fact, that there is generally no other cure for our vices.

Every night labors to undo the physiological mischief of the preceding day—at what expense, gluttons may compute if they compare the golden dreams of their childhood with the leaden torpor-slumbers of their pork and lager-beer years.

If it were not for calorific food and superfluous garments, midsummer would be the most pleasant time of the year.



N the name of the British Association, which for the time I very unworthily represent, I beg to tender to you, my Lord Mayor, and through you to the city of York, our cordial thanks for your hospitable invitation and hearty, welcome. We feel, indeed, that in coming to York we were coming home: gratefully as we acknowledge and much as we appreciate the kindness we have experienced elsewhere, and the friendly relations which exist between this Association and most—I might even say all—our great cities, yet Sir R. Murchison truly observed, at the close of our first meeting in 1831, that to York, "as the cradle of the Association, we shall ever look back with gratitude; and whether we meet hereafter on the banks of the Isis, the Cam, or the Forth, to this spot we shall still fondly revert." Indeed, it would have been a matter of much regret to all of us if we had not been able on this, our fiftieth anniversary, to hold our meeting in our mother city.

My Lord Mayor, before going further, I must express my regret, especially when I call to mind the illustrious men who have preceded 