144 THE PRINCIPLES OF HEREDITY 



there may be among them in their other arrangements, such 

 as the very various kinds of discipline and occupation. 



232. " The same hygienic disadvantages arising out of the 

 manner of living among confined bodies of people, which we 

 have just been considering, contribute not a little to the 

 prevalence of consumption, be it more or less, among the 

 population living at large ; and that holds good equally for 

 the well-to-do classes and for the poor. Here, again, there is 

 no mistaking the drawbacks in the mode of life which has 

 come along with the progress of modern civilization. 'The 

 prevalence of consumption among the families of our villagers 

 and farmers/ says an American writer, 'can be shown, we 

 believe, to have kept step with the deviation of these families 

 from their former frugal, active, and industrious manners of 

 life, and their adoption of the absurd practices which 

 characterize the mode of our fashionable classes in the large 

 cities/ Once more, I think, the stress should be laid on 

 spending the time amidst bad ventilation indoors, in living- 

 rooms, but more particularly in bedrooms. In the latter the 

 human being spends nearly half of his existence; and the 

 rooms assigned as bedrooms by the better classes are too 

 often chosen not on considerations of health, but out of a 

 device to have the greatest amount of comfort in the public 

 rooms of the house. 



233. " But the dark side of civilization nowhere shows its 

 influence for spreading consumption more decidedly than in 

 those disastrous outbreaks of disease among peoples who were 

 wont to live perfectly free from all restraint and convention- 

 ality, but now have come into contact with Europeans, and 

 have adopted European manners and vices. Of that we have 

 sad examples in the ravages of consumption among certain 

 tribes of North American Indians, among the natives of 

 several groups of islands in the Pacific, among the Maoris of 

 New Zealand, and in Algiers. 1 



234. "The same circumstances serve to account for the 

 strikingly common occurrence of phthisis in nunneries, semi- 

 naries and such-like institutions, in evidence whereof a 

 number of observations have been brought forward by Four- 

 cault, also in the Oriental harems, not only among the women 

 but among little children also ; again among badly-lodged 

 troops, of which we have evidence from England, France, 

 Turkey, and India ; and above all in prisons. 



235. " Among many surgeons there is complete agreement 

 that cases of phthisis are least common in soldiers when they 



1 Hirsch, vol. iii., pp. 222-5. 



