A SANITARY OUTLOOK 355 



extraordinary impeachment. Surgeons do somehow succeed in exclu- 

 ding from wounds bacilli of an injurious character in injurious num- 

 bers, 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 emi- 

 nent in his profession, they may tend to check a movement of great 

 promise. 



In the same newspaper that contained Dr. Maudsley's fling at sana- 

 toriums, 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 chil- 

 dren'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 de- 

 flects 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 sub- 

 ject 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 im- 



