Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/340

326 The pent-up denizens of the courts and alleys of our large towns, surrounded on every side by imperfect light, bad air, and the general aspects of low life, necessarily degenerate in physical competency, and their offspring is of a feeble type. Fortunately, one antidote is to be found in the nomadic instincts of such offspring. Better the gutter-life and street Arab gymnastics than the sickly incapability of a pent-up cellar child. When people are huddled together in badly ventilated hovels and narrow courts, compelled to live almost without light and air, the effects are soon made clear. The unsavory courts and slums of our large towns can not but be productive of a lowered vital force and impoverished physique. The fact must not be overlooked that there are two classes of town-dwellers: one being those who dwell for a limited number of hours in the day—that is, whose occupation keeps them in close offices and places of business during the day, but who sleep in the suburbs in purer atmospheric conditions; and those who pass the whole of their lives in bad contaminated air without the advantage of a few hours' respite out of the twenty-four. It is with the latter class that my observations deal.

The second chief factor of deterioration—viz., bad habits of life—tells a sad story on the physical power of the town-dweller; probably through ignorance, but certainly indifference to the ordinary precepts of health is the rule of life. It is no doubt a fact that intemperance largely exists among this class, and the incidence of debauch upon them is heavier than upon those who live under more favorable conditions. Then the various forms of impurity smite with devitalizing severity the offspring to the third and fourth generations. Moreover, the general tendency of their ailments is of the asthenic type. When we add to these conditions of human existence the influence of imperfect feeding and malnutrition, we get the state of physical degeneracy largely increased and emphasized. In the paper alluded to great stress was laid upon the diet of the town-dweller, as compared with that of the countryman, as tending to degeneracy and impaired health. The digestive capability of the former is of a lower standard, and less capable of dealing with the ordinary articles of diet, than the latter. Consequently, they live on such food as they can digest without suffering—bread, fish, and meat; above all, the last. The sapid, tasty flesh of animals, which sits lightly upon the stomach, gives an acceptable feeling of satiety, so pleasant to experience. Such selection is natural and intelligible, but it is fraught with danger. I quote from the paper: "The chief diet selected by the town-dweller begets a condition known to doctors as the uricacid diathesis, with its many morbid consequences. Pulmonary phthisis and Bright's disease seem Dame Nature's means of weeding out degenerating town-dwellers." Such are some of the