404 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



According to Marshall (" Human and Comparative Physiology "), 

 " potatoes are a weak food, one pound being only equivalent to about 

 six ounces of bread, or four ounces and a half of lentils ; they are not 

 much more nutritious than the succulent vegetables." It follows that, 

 in order to support the body at all, enormous quantities must be eaten. 

 The stomach expands to accommodate the huge bulk of this inefficient 

 food, the body becomes paunchy, and the limbs of children, enfeebled 

 by rachitis, occasioned partly by the miserable food and partly by the 

 unwholesome surroundings, bend under the weight of the trunk, and 

 the deformity already described is the result. The writer remembers 

 distinctly the time when large bands of Irishmen used to visit Eng- 

 land and Scotland, during the autumn of each year, to be employed 

 on the harvest-field as shearers or reapers. But, owing to the intro- 

 duction of machinery, that occupation is gone. The harvest only em- 

 ploys men for a few weeks each year ; but the building of iron ships 

 is carried on all through the year : the shearers have become riveters, 

 and have remained in Glasgow. The late Hugh Miller, describing 

 those reapers, wrote thus : " Pot-bellied and bow-legged, and with 

 scarcely a rag to cover them, these wretches walk abroad into the 

 daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and 

 Irish want." The vice of constitution, acquired in the miserable cabins 

 of the wilds of Connaught, has become hereditary, and it is the now 

 recognized principle of heredity which accounts for the deformed legs 

 of the children of Glasgow. When the bones are bent at obtuse an- 

 gles, the deformity is usually treated in the hospitals by fracture, i. e., 

 the bones (both tibi83 and fibulae) are broken at the angle, and the frac- 

 ture is treated in the usual manner. This is done, however, after the 

 bones have become hard and have assumed a permanent set. 



It may be objected by American observers that the Irish in Amer- 

 ica exhibit none of these excruciating deformities. But it must be re- 

 membered that few but reasonably able-bodied Irish manage to get 

 to America. Few others can get together the means to pay their pas- 

 sage ; and any cripples or seriously deformed persons would be liable 

 to be refused passage by the transportation companies, or rejected and 

 sent back as paupers on arrival here. At this point, again, the law of 

 heredity comes into play, for if the parents, and the children which 

 they bring along with them, are not rachitic, the chances are that the 

 children and children's children born in America, will not be rachitic 

 either. 



