THE OUTLOOK FOR HUMAN HEALTH 163 



blood pressure will be regarded as compatible with perfect 

 health. The great mass of humanity which lives, thrives and 

 maintains a high standard of physical health under totally 

 different conditions exists, it is true, but to their myopic vision 

 the outlines of the physiology of these peoples appear blurred 

 and indistinct, to them as little worthy of study as would be 

 the course of Halley's comet to a fish. Like the ancient Romans 

 and Greeks or the Chinese until recently, they contemn where 

 they do not ignore the habit of life of the outer barbarian tribes. 

 The absence of any particular nexus between high civilisation 

 and a condition of rude health seems to have wholly escaped 

 their attention ; on the contrary not a few seriously connect 

 the present custom of heavy meat-eating with modern in- 

 tellectual development, one hardy authority even ascribing 

 the lack of enterprise amongst South Italians to the absence 

 of this substance in their dietary. Shades of Plato, of Pytha- 

 goras, of the Caliph Omar and hosts of other vegetarian 

 worthies down, we had almost written, to Bernard Shaw ! 



Setting aside such bizarre suggestions as unworthy of a 

 profession which at least claims to think scientifically, surely 

 to those who decline to accept the commoner non-microbic 

 diseases, like the winter sleet and the summer rain, as un- 

 avoidable incidents in human life, the existence of large popu- 

 lations living under the most varied conditions of climate, 

 geographical surroundings, dietary, clothing and dwellings 

 affords an admirable field for the investigation of the real 

 etiology of these diseases. If various populations in which 

 a specified disease is rife have only one outstanding circum- 

 stance in common, whilst others in which it either does not 

 occur or occurs only very infrequently have nothing else in 

 common except the absence of that circumstance, why, then, 

 one may reasonably link the causation of the disease with the 

 circumstance in question. What in fact is required is an 

 application to pathology of the method which Dr. Archdall 

 Reid has used with such brilliant effect in respect to the 

 mentality of races. Thus, as he has pointed out, the followers 

 of the orthodox religions are usually inferior to the heretics 

 in intelligence, energy, and initiative, tend in fact, under equal 

 circumstances, to become " hewers of wood and drawers of 

 water " to the latter. This difference is not due to any question 

 of race, for portions of the same race differ in mentality ac- 



