Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/533

Rh organism has to undergo certain modifications, considerable in extreme cases, and correspondingly less easy to undo. For every "second nature" is, probably, a compromise with the persistency of untoward conditions. Iron-workers become less sensitive, and at last rather partial, to the fervid temperature of their workshops. Butchers, like the North American Indians, and other carnivora, are apt to contract a disposition which enables them to pursue their sanguinary vocation with callousness, or something akin to satisfaction. .Slaves become sneaks, i. e., amateur flunkeys. The love of light, too often punished with autos-da-fé, becomes a love of dusk, if not of darkness; the Arian skeptic subsides into a resigned Capuchin—Nature forbears to maintain a hopeless struggle. For similar reasons, perhaps, she yields to the persistent infatuation of the self-poisoners, called topers and opium eaters. Further resistance would imply chronic sea-sickness, and, under the circumstances, an abnormal fondness for strong drink may appear a lesser evil. Yet the characteristics of such propensities distinguish them clearly from a natural instinct; they have to be artificially acquired, their importunity knows no limits, and their free indulgence is always followed by a depressing reaction. Thus, even in yielding. Nature remains true to her preordained laws. No one can hope to evade their self-avenging rigor, though the mode of retribution may take the unexpected form of chaining the miscreant to his idol

—The dangers incident to our artificial modes of life seem now and then to deceive the foresight of instinct in a way typified in the non-repulsiveness of certain mineral poisons. Nature has taken ample precautions to secure her creatures against the poison perils of the upper world—hemlock, foxglove, and belladonna—but failed to provide safeguards against such subterranean evils as arsenic, or the social dangers yet slumbering in the womb of Time. Providence, however, may have foreseen that perils evoked by the potent hand of Science could be avoided in the same way; though the struggle for existence may, in the course of time, evolve supplementary instincts. Those fittest to survive, methinks, already begin to evince an intuitive aversion to the sugar-coated poisons that have reduced our average longevity to less than forty years. The world is getting prudent by natural selection. The children of the twentieth century will not be apt to overrate the nutritive value of fusel-oil.

—The healing instincts of Nature, which teach the surfeited brute to abstain from food, somehow fail to take cognizance of the disorders caused by the agency of microscopic parasites, entozoa, etc. It has been suggested that the development of such organisms is as foreign to the autonomy of the human system as the growth of the mistletoe is to that of the oak, and thus escapes the jurisdiction of its self-regulating laws. But a still more suggestive circumstance is the fact that disorders of the class named reveal their origin plainly enough to permit a direct removal of the cause, which,