6 Human Physiology. 



drinks beverages that destroy his health and senses, and from 

 sheer ignorance, lives in conditions that breed pestilence and 

 destroy whole populations. Man is the only creature on this 

 earth who is, in multitudes of instances, ignorant and helpless, 

 while he is the only one capable of vast acquirements of 

 knowledge. Every other creature is limited in its capacities 

 for improvement, and most of them through thousands of 

 generations show neither improvement nor deterioration. 

 But man can rise to the sublimest heights of wisdom and 

 virtue, or sink into the lowest depths of ignorance, vice, crime, 

 and misery. 



Man alone, of all earthly creatures, believes in God and 

 immortality. Either he has had the power to conceive the 

 ideas of a Creator of the universe, and of a life beyond the 

 grave, or they have been revealed to him. We have no reason 

 to believe that any of the animals to which man is by some 

 supposed to be allied, or from which he is held to have been 

 descended, ever conceived, or is capable of receiving the idea 

 of a creative intelligence or a spiritual life. 



Man is the onjy creature we know, who is capable of 

 studying his own nature, faculties, duties, and destiny. To all 

 others such knowledge would be useless. To man it is of the 

 most urgent necessity. Let us, then, consider what man is, 

 and what he should be. 



The human population of this planet is estimated at about 

 one thousand or twelve hundred millions. The population of 

 China alone is said to be three hundred millions. As the 

 Chinese Empire is not one tenth of the earth's surface, it is 

 evident that the earth is but sparsely peopled. The surface of 

 the earth has an area of one hundred and fifty millions of 

 geographical square miles. If we deduct two-thirds of this 

 space for water and other uninhabitable regions, we have left 

 fifty millions of square miles. Portions of Belgium have five 



