t60 LAWS OF AniLTIPLICATION. 



In youth or in that early maturity during which the vigour 

 is the greatest and the digestim the best : it does not 

 habitually accompany the highest power of taking up nutri- 

 tive materials. When fatness arises in the prime of life, 

 whether from peculiarity of food or other circumstance, it is 

 not the sign of an increased total vitality. On the contrary, if 

 great muscular action has to be gone through, the fat must 

 be got rid of — either, as in a man, by training, or as in a 

 horse that has grown bulky while out at grass, by putting 

 him on such more nutritive diet as oats. The 



frequency of senile fatness, both in domesticated creatures 

 and in ourselves, has a similar implication. Whether we 

 consider the smaller ability of those who display it to with- 

 stand large demands on their powers, or whether we consider 

 the comparatively-inferior digestion common among them, 

 we see that the increased size indicates, not an abundance of 

 materials which the organism requires, but an abundance of 

 materials which it does not require. Of like mean- 



ing is the fact that women who have had several children, 

 and animals after they have gone on bearing young for some 

 time, frequently become fat; and lose their fecundity as 

 they do this. In such cases, the fatness is not to be taken as 

 tbe cause of the infecundity ; but the constitutional ex- 

 haustion which the previous production of offspring has left, 

 shows itself at once in the failing fecundity and the com- 

 mencing fatness. There is yet another kind of evidence. 

 Obesity not uncommonly sets in after the system has 

 been subject to debilitating influences. Often a serious illness 

 is followed by a corpulence to which there was previously no 

 tendency. And the prolonged administration of mercury, con 

 stitutionally injurious as it is, sometimes produces a like effect. 

 Closer inquiry verifies the conclusion to which these facts 

 point. The microscope shows that along with the increase of 

 bulk common in advanced life, there goes on what is called 

 ** fatty degeneration :" oil-globules are deposited where there 

 should be particles of flesh— or rather, we may say, the hydro- 



