202 THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE. 



fortune to vary in the right direction and to secure the 

 proper E. 



Every man will do well to cast his mind into the past, and 

 essay to picture to himself the fierce conflict which has raged 

 from the beginning to the end of his evolutionary career. Let 

 him travel back through the long ancestral line until he arrives 

 at his unicellular ancestors. How countless the generations ! 

 and yet each individual member in the long line has been 

 subject to enormous competition, has had to struggle with 

 countless adverse conditions, and has emerged successfully 

 from the conflict. Out of such a conflict have we risen. 

 Each one in our long line of ancestors has been chosen from 

 very many other individuals ; so that in every successive 

 generation the birth of every animal into the world becomes 

 more and more a matter of "chance'** — results more and 

 more from an inconceivably complex assemblage of pre-exist- 

 ing combinations. 



Surely, therefore, some dignity is attached to the existence 

 of every animal, and to man above all others. The thought 

 may well kindle a feeling of pride in every healthy man, 

 for is he not the expression and the result of a series of 

 successful conflicts extending back into the dim past — to the 

 period, in fact, of life's first evolution ? Thus does the biologist 

 soliloquize when he contemplates a beautiful animal. How 

 painful a thing is it to him to see a healthy man, the chosen 

 of the chosen, damning and wrecking his beautiful organiza- 

 tion, and leaving no likeness of himself to future generations, 

 or, if a likeness, one that bears upon it the curse of his mis- 

 deeds ! 



Nor is it only by the indiscretions and misconduct of the 

 individual that the long slow work of ages is wasted. War, 

 too, interferes with the process of natural selection, reversing 

 it, in fact, and weeding out the healthy and vigorous, while the 

 halt and maimed are left at home to perpetuate the race. 

 Already this weeding out of the "fittest" has worked with terrible 

 effect on the physique of the French nation . Where, now, are 

 the stalwart warriors who formed the body-guard of the first 

 Napoleon ? And it is not merely on his physical side that man 

 * I use the word " chance n here in the popular sense. 



