Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/360

356 that we should accurately distinguish between these environmental influences that are temporary in their effects and modify the individual or existing generation, and those that are permanent, and, as it were, sink in and modify the race.

It was in connection with the former of these that the contemptuous treatment of heredity at Leicester, to which I have alluded, took place. Dr. William Hall, who has done so much to stir up an active interest in the feeding of school children, impressed by the prompt and striking results he had witnessed by beneficially influencing their food environment, threw discredit on heredity, and not only so, but argued that there is really only one important element in environment, and that is food. He went so far as to say that food altered the whole condition of the individual, and that the children in the slums of our great cities, properly fed, could be reared superior in physique to children reared in better class districts, which, from his own point of view, proved rather too much, for if the slum children when well fed are superior to the better class children, presumably equally well fed, then they must have inherited more vigorous constitutions, or the better class children must be retarded in their development by conditions other than food. Amongst the Jewish children in Leeds, examined by Dr. Hall, who were so much stronger and less rickety than the Gentile children living in the same district, careful feeding may have been, and probably was, the principal factor in their better health and vigor, but there were other factors which should not be ignored. Eacial characteristics must count for something. Dr. Hall says that the poor Jew is more self-reliant, temperate, and has a greater power of resisting infectious disease than the poor Gentile. Does he suggest that these traits must also be attributed to feeding? Then the Mosaic law bears on personal hygiene through other channels than that of diet. The Tenth Ward in New York, the population of which consists almost entirely of Russian and Polish Jews, is the most densely populated in the city, both as regards the number of inhabitants to the acre and of tenants to the house, and notwithstanding this the Tenth Ward has the extremely low death rate, for New York, of 17.14, and is surpassed in healthfulness only by two wards out of the twenty-four of the city—one a business, and the other a suburban district. Now this favorable death-rate and general salubrity of the Tenth Ward are not the result of superior economic conditions, or better feeding, for the people are of the very poorest class, but must be credited to cleanliness and that careful observance of domestic sanitation in all its branches, enjoined by Hebraic rule and custom.

No one will underrate the importance of the part played by food in physical development, or the sinister effects of a deficiency of it, especially when growth is going on, in the production of degeneration; but, as Dr. Dawson Williams pointed out, it is going far to say that the