518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 8 



cal with, the Pfeiffer or influenza bacillus to cause the disease, a prin- 

 ciple similar to one originally postulated by David Smith for lung 

 abscess. 



But the devotees of both the social and the natural sciences are 

 facing still another problem of increasing significance and major 

 importance today. Whereas famine and war and pestilence have 

 acted jointly, and frequently coincidently, in the past in the role of 

 Lord High Executioner for the race, and mediators of the law of the 

 "survival of the fittest," it is no longer the physical so much as the 

 social and economic forces attendant upon the transition from a slow- 

 tempo agrarian to a high-tempo industrial civilization, which are pick- 

 ing out the constitutionally unfit and eliminating the psychobiologi- 

 cally inferior. The American disease, as Emerson, Bateman, and 

 others have designated it, challenges the best effort and skill of the 

 modern physician and social worker. This disease camouflages 

 under numerous and varied symptomatologies, but the common 

 denominator of them all is the highly altered tension under which life 

 is lived today, as contrasted with a few decades ago. The human 

 body is a delicately adjusted, exceedingly complex mechanism with 

 very definite limitations which vary constitutionally from individual 

 to individual. The psyche is more important to its proper functioning 

 than many of the organic processes which have received such careful 

 and detailed study in the past. The central nervous system of man 

 by the very nature of its integrating, governing, and association func- 

 tions reflects this crowning achievement in organic evolution on the 

 earth today. The material creations of this collective brain, never- 

 theless, are not being "intelligently" directed and mastered and kept 

 servile to objectives and ends, which would be for the best interests of 

 the race as a whole. Annihilation awaits those who either individually 

 or collectively fail to recognize the "handwriting on the wall." The 

 social and natural sciences must together advance even more clearly 

 and definitely into this domain of modern life and, with increasing 

 factual data upon which to base judgments, make certain that a leader- 

 ship fully conscious of the lurking dangers as well as the potential 

 possibilities directs our destinies. 



Claude Bernard, one of the great physiologists of all time, had rare 

 insight into the dominating motivation of those men of science he 

 designated as the Truth Seekers: "Ardent desire for knowledge, and 

 this knowledge really grasped, and yet always flying before them, 

 becomes at once their sole torment and sole happiness. Those who do 

 not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discov- 

 ery, which is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel. 

 But, by a whim of Nature, the joy of discovery, so sought and hoped 

 for, vanishes as soon as found. It is but a flash, whose gleam discovers 

 for us fresh horizons toward which our insatiate curiosity repairs with 



