257 



on what is so unhappily called experience. As 

 opposed to this "experience" microscopical observa- 

 tion has revealed that practically the whole of the 

 mortality among nestlings is the result of the poison 

 thrown out by septic organisms acting upon the 

 delicate tissues of these immature bodies. We should 

 therefore be smart enough to recognize that where the 

 effect is so constant, the cause, or rather its carrier, 

 should be sought for in the shape of something equally 

 constant. Slavish adherence to tradition however has 

 so blinded us that the one substance common to us all 

 in our breeding capacity, and therefore the most likely 

 to be the common carrier of the trouble, has all along 

 been staring us in the face, and yet we have been 

 unable to see it. We have each of us preferred to 

 cast the blame on some different circumstance and to 

 exalt our own "experience" as the " one and only 

 Jones." It is quite obvious to the average under- 

 standing that we cannot all of us have been right, and 

 3'et since each disputant's argument of " experience" 

 is p7inia facie as good as any of the others', it would 

 according to this seem after all that none of us have 

 been wrong, which to say the least is curious. But 

 seeing, even without the evidence afforded by con- 

 structive experiments, that by the processes of com- 

 parison and of eliminating one b}^ one all our old 

 presumed causes, we have not succeeded in the 

 slightest degree in reducing the infantile death rate 

 from septicaemia, we now begin to realize that all of 

 us must have been wrong, and that it is the still 

 universal ^^'g food that is the most frequent carrier 

 and the most invigorating medium for our ubiquitous 

 enemy. 



To resume : — having by so man}^ illogical reasons 

 accounted for the inordinate infantile death rate of 

 their hybrids, and having at the end of the breeding 

 and moulting seasons comfortably dismissed it from 

 their minds, our breeders now shift their grounds of 



