Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/359

Rh extraordinary impeachment. Surgeons do somehow succeed in excluding from wounds bacilli of an injurious character in injurious numbers, and a recent experience in Birmingham suggests that the ice-creams there would have been none the worse for sterilization by boiling, even at the sacrifice of the whole of their nutritive and glacial virtues.

I venture to think that Dr. Maudsley has spoken too despondently about the sanatorial treatment of consumption, and I regret the wide publication of his views, because, coming as they do from one so eminent in his profession, they may tend to check a movement of great promise.

In the same newspaper that contained Dr. Maudsley's fling at sanatoriums, I read a report of a discussion on physical deterioration that must, I think, have proved somewhat bewildering to the man in the railway train. Physical deterioration was affirmed and denied; it was traced to education and to the want of education. It was declared to be decimating our infant population and to be non-existent till the age of thirteen. It was ascribed to underfeeding and overfeeding, to cheap sweets and cigarettes, to maternal neglect, paternal drunkenness, and the want of a Minister of Public Health of cabinet rank. I can not pause to reconcile these apparently divergent views, for, of course, they are reconcilable, but there was one statement made so startling that I should like to refer to it more particularly. And that was that 'environment would knock heredity into a cocked hat,' a statement leading to an article in the paper headed 'The Bubble of Heredity Pricked,' which must mean that organic creation has burst up. Now it may be well that there should be a reaction against an extreme and fatalistic belief in the power of ancestral sour grapes to set the children's teeth on edge, but we can not altogether dispense with heredity, and any one who will contemplate a sheep and a cow and a goose and a rabbit, all brought up on the same common, fed on the same grass, and exposed to the same weather, will realize that there are limits to the power of environment. Tremendous are the potentialities pent up in those little particles of protoplasm—the germ and sperm cell. The truth is that heredity lies at the core of things, while environment plays on the surface. Their reciprocal influences may be detected in every living being. Heredity modifies environment, and environment deflects heredity, always within bounds and under some higher authority that controls the two. The plan of the edifice is practically fixed, but its dimensions, stability, symmetry, soundness and adornment, are subject to modification as the building goes on, and must depend largely on the nature of the material supplied and on the character of the builders. Heredity is, in every individual, made up of two convergent hereditary streams, and becomes solid at the center, but has a fluent edge, and it is on that that environment operates. It is of great