Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/416

404 According to Marshall ("Human and Comparative Physiology"), "potatoes are a weak food, one pound being only equivalent to about six ounces of bread, or four ounces and a half of lentils; they are not much more nutritious than the succulent vegetables." It follows that, in order to support the body at all, enormous quantities must be eaten. The stomach expands to accommodate the huge bulk of this inefficient food, the body becomes paunchy, and the limbs of children, enfeebled by rachitis, occasioned partly by the miserable food and partly by the unwholesome surroundings, bend under the weight of the trunk, and the deformity already described is the result. The writer remembers distinctly the time when large bands of Irishmen used to visit England and Scotland, during the autumn of each year, to be employed on the harvest-field as shearers or reapers. But, owing to the introduction of machinery, that occupation is gone. The harvest only employs men for a few weeks each year; but the building of iron ships is carried on all through the year: the shearers have become riveters, and have remained in Glasgow. The late Hugh Miller, describing those reapers, wrote thus: "Pot-bellied and bow-legged, and with scarcely a rag to cover them, these wretches walk abroad into the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish want." The vice of constitution, acquired in the miserable cabins of the wilds of Connaught, has become hereditary, and it is the now recognized principle of heredity which accounts for the deformed legs of the children of Glasgow. When the bones are bent at obtuse angles, the deformity is usually treated in the hospitals by fracture, i. e., the bones (both tibiæ and fibulæ) are broken at the angle, and the fracture is treated in the usual manner. This is done, however, after the bones have become hard and have assumed a permanent set.

It may be objected by American observers that the Irish in America exhibit none of these excruciating deformities. But it must be remembered that few but reasonably able-bodied Irish manage to get to America. Few others can get together the means to pay their passage; and any cripples or seriously deformed persons would be liable to be refused passage by the transportation companies, or rejected and sent back as paupers on arrival here. At this point, again, the law of heredity comes into play, for if the parents, and the children which they bring along with them, are not rachitic, the chances are that the children and children's children born in America, will not be rachitic either.