THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE. 295 



happiness and failure result, while success and happiness 

 might have been theirs had they chosen the right calling. 

 In the former instance we may justly say that the mental S 

 and the mental E are abnormal to one another ; in the latter, 

 normal. 



The following passage from the pen of one who had a deep 

 knowledge of human nature and its workings, so thoroughly 

 embodies this idea that I venture to give it in cxtenso : — 



" Some of my amiable readers, no doubt, are in the habit of visiting 

 that famous garden in the Regent's Park, in which so many of our 

 finned, feathered, and four-footed fellow-creatures are accommodated 

 w T ith board and lodging, in return for which they exhibit themselves 

 for our instruction and amusement : and there, as a man's business 

 and private thoughts follow him everywhere and mix themselves 

 with all life and nature round about him, I found myself, whilst 

 looking at some fish in the aquarium, still actually thinking of our 

 friends the Virginians. One of the most beautiful motion-masters I 

 ever beheld, sweeping through his green bath in harmonious curves, 

 now turning his black glistening back to me, now exhibiting his fair 

 white chest, in every movement active and graceful, turned out to 

 be our old homely friend the flounder, whom we have all gobbled up 

 out of his bath of water souchy at Greenwich, without having the 

 slightest idea that he was a beauty. 



"As is the race of man, so is the race of flounders. If you can 

 but see the latter in his right element, you may view him agile, 

 healthy and comely : put him out of his place, and behold his beauty 

 is gone, his motions are disgraceful ; he flaps the unfeeling ground 

 ridiculously with his tail, and will presently gasp his feeble life out. 

 'Take him up tenderly, ere too late, and cast him into his native 



Thames again But stop : I believe there is a certain proverb 



about fish out of water, and that other profound naturalists have 

 remarked on them before me. Now Harry Warrington had been 

 floundering for ever so long a time past out of his proper element. 

 As soon as he found it, health, strength, spirits, energy, returned to 

 him, and with the tap of the epaulet on his shoulder he sprang up 

 an altered being. He delighted in his new profession ; he engaged 

 in all its details, and mastered them with eagerness," &c. — The 

 Virginians, Vol. II. chapter xviii. 



This is one of many similar passages which might be taken 

 from works of fiction, to show what the discernment of the 



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