HEALTH AND THE LAWS OF MECHANICS 121 



health also requires favourable conditions in the 

 medium. Nature does not alter her laws, which 

 are immutable, and health, which is a consequence 

 of them, must also be unchangeable ; therefore, if 

 Nature has fixed principles, man alone is responsible 

 for his own ills. Health has so great an importance 

 in the evolution of humanity, that without it there 

 can be no regular progress ; every being that changes 

 its normal state through having lost its adaptation 

 to natural laws is degenerate, and, therefore, 

 selection and heredity cannot take place, and so 

 the process of evolution in man is retarded. A 

 sick humanity is a drag upon progress, if not a cause 

 of regression. A civilisation like the present, 

 which so changes natural laws as to make man an 

 exception, is an absurdity. 



Nature has made man healthy ; society so under- 

 mines his constitution that it ruins his health. 



Every organisation is due to definite combina- 

 tions, and this fact is easily proved in the case of 

 crystals, for example, the symmetry of form being 

 a consequence of exactness in the chemical 

 combination. In plants and animals there exists 

 the same fixity of chemical combination and form : 

 see the elements of which flowers are composed, 

 how they have the same number of sepals and petals, 

 or rather of stamens and pistils ; how the leaves 

 are arranged in each species in a peculiar way. In 



