Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/131

Rh made a bid for fame by proposing. We are all familiar with the brilliant feats of modern surgery in replacing damaged portions of the human body by sound and healthy parts obtained elsewhere. Autoplasty is one of the wide-reaching benefactions of science. Scalped mill-operatives have been furnished with good-as-new chevelures by piecemeal contributions from the heads of accommodating friends. Mangled eyes have been successfully replaced by healthy ones taken from cats and rabbits. For centuries the victims of Oriental despotism have had their noses and ears restored by the skilled "leeches" of India, Turkey, and Persia. So common have become operations for the restoration of noses, eyelids, ears, lips, palates, and tracheal, that each of these has received a distinct name in medical literature. Nor have the surgeons stopped with these external organs, but have boldly invaded the interior of the system; and I think it is on record that one surgeon succeeded in saving his patient's life by patching up his cæcum with the intestines of a sheep.

Why is not this idea capable of indefinite expansion? We all know that, as a rule, men do not break down like the "Wonderful One-Hoss Shay," which

 went to pieces all at once— All at once, and nothing first— Just as bubbles when they burst."

Almost invariably they die from the wearing out or lesion of some one organ.

Now, anatomists tell us that we have not a muscle, nerve, or organ which is not duplicated in some one of the lower animals. This being the case, what is to prevent the skillful surgeon, when he finds that one of his patient's viscera—cranial, thoracic, or abdominal—has become incapable of performing its functions, on account of wearing out or weakness, from removing it, and substituting a brand-new one from some healthy and high-bred animal?

For example, instead of using the pancreatic juice of the lower animals, as Dr. Brown-Séquard proposes, why not transplant the organ which produces it, and thus insure the patient a never-failing supply of the digestive fluid produced on the spot? When a man's pancreas becomes debilitated from years of unremitting toil with fried pork and mince-pies, and goes on a strike, threatening stoppage of all other bodily functions and death, why not skillfully excise it, and put in its place, say, the pancreas of a goat or a pig? The wound heals by first intention; the man's digestion recovers the tone of his boyhood days; the food his wife cooks tastes as well as "the things mother used to make"; existence again becomes sweet music, and he takes a new lease of life, until some other organ breaks down, which can be similarly replaced.

So, on the simple plan of the old lady who made a pair of stockings last a lifetime by knitting on new feet one year and new legs the next, men can readily attain the age of Methuselah, with no other drawbacks than periodic recoveries from surgical operations, which will be no worse than their customary "spells of fever," "attacks of indigestion," "nervous prostration," "malarial poisoning," and the like.

I have endeavored to treat this important subject with proper scientific gravity. I anticipate, however, the ghoulish glee of the professional humorist, who will gloat over the prospect of prominent citizens being alluded to as "well-repaired" instead of "well-preserved" men, and who will give the overworked stove-pipe, mother-in-law, and front gate a rest, in order to exploit the funny possibilities of a mature gentleman who has been patched up until he has the digestive apparatus of a goat, the vocal and respiratory machinery of a donkey, and a cranial cavity filled with the ganglia of a sheep or an intelligent Newfoundland dog.

I anticipate also the moral and scriptural objections of a part of the clergy, as to the effect upon the soul of this incorporation with the beasts of the field.

But all great ideas must encounter this sort of thing, and so mine must perforce endure it.

Editor Popular /Science Monthly:

Mr. Philpott's able essay on "The Origin of Property," in the "Monthly" for September, he quotes Prof. Leslie's notable remarks on the true meaning of the word "property." While there may have been others who have also called attention to the same point, I can not refrain from specially referring Mr. Philpott and your readers to Volume II of the works of the late Thomas Hill Green, a thinker whose acute and lucid discussion of fundamental political notions has received singularly inadequate notice. He frequently touches bottom ground with a firmness characteristic of no other political writer known to me, and in this instance he phrases with especial felicity (Vol. II, "Principles of Political Obligation," pp. 517 'et seq.) the idea upheld by Mr. Philpott and Prof. Leslie: "Two questions are apt to be mixed up which ought to be kept distinct. One is the question how men came to appropriate; the other, the question how the idea of right has come to be associated with their appropriations. . . . One condition of the existence of property, then, is appropriation. But another condition must be fulfilled in order to constitute property. This is the recognition by others of a man's appropriations as something which they will treat as his, not theirs, and the guarantee to him of his appropriations by means of that