JOHN S. FUI/TON, M. D. 147 



toward the end of life, the sickness curve falls rapidly, becom- 

 ing insignificant at eighty-five years, fifteen years before the 

 death curve becomes insignificant. 



Elderton's sickness curve for childhood makes a questionable 

 start, abreast of the deaths curve. The other three curves start 

 earlier than the mortality curve, the curve of youth stretching 

 backward completely through the curve of childhood, through 

 the two years of infancy, and on into prenatal time. Three of 

 the curves finish later than the corresponding mortality curves, 

 the exception being that of old age. 4 



It seems necessary to examine the probabilities of childhood 

 mortality rather closely; for the known time relations of scarlet 

 fever, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough prepare us to 

 expect an after-coming morbidity mode in infancy as well as in 

 childhood. But the late start of the sickness curve in child- 

 hood, and its very late maximum, suggest the existence of large 

 contingent probabilities, outweighing the essential probabilities 

 of whole life in one period, but not manifested in three suc- 

 ceeding periods. We must be careful not to go beyond neces- 

 sity in admitting probabilities which are to be both highly 

 potent and wholly exhausted within a narrow range. Ideas 

 of irregularity have little place in a conception of the forces 

 which can bring generation after generation through the life 

 invisible in such order as to repeat time after time the familiar 

 pattern which we see between the ligature of Omphale and the 

 shears of Atropos. It is safer to think of life as traversing 

 our field of vision with astral steadiness, followed (or accom- 

 panied) by an invisible twin, the dark Moira, known to us 

 only through the mediation of sickness. If we assign to the 

 vitality mass a parsimonious value, and to the mortality mass 

 a like value, just sufficient to cover the whole range of prob- 

 abilities, we may divide the intervening space and make a scale 

 to which denominate numbers may be applied ; mortality values 

 diminishing in one direction, vitality values diminishing in the 

 other direction. All the possibilities of sickness will lie between 

 the centre of mortality and the centre of vitality, but we shall 

 be able to measure them no farther than we can trace increasing 

 magnitudes in the direction of the dark planet, and no farther 

 than we can distinguish diminishing magnitudes toward the 

 light one. 



At birth life comes into view accompanied by sickness in 

 large amounts. Pearson's figures account for 605 lethal doses 

 of sickness in the antenatal history of a reproductive effort 

 which brings forth 1,000 infants alive on their proper birthday. 



*Four sickness curves finish later, If we Include that of infancy, of which 

 the tail only is discernible in Elder-ton's data, and furnishes a significant figure 

 at the age of twelve years. 



