66 WARFARE IN THE HUMAN BODY 



pathologists have done good work in some branches of 

 evolutionary theory. Bland-Sutton, in his fruitful little 

 book Evolution and Disease, pointed out that, " Pathology is 

 only a department of Biology, and it is important to bear 

 this in mind in studying disease." It is true that he went 

 little further than to show that what is pathological in one 

 organism may be physiological in another, and that many 

 diseases are reversions, that is, failure in normal growth. 

 Yet this greatly needed to be shown, and it is not to be 

 expected of a great pathologist and surgeon, and, per- 

 haps, the less the greater he is in his own branches of work, 

 that he should attempt tasks from which many of the 

 biologists themselves seemed to shrink. Claude Bernard 

 made similar remarks as to pathology. It is to be re- 

 gretted that a stumbling-block was placed in the path 

 of progress by Darwin's hopeless dictum as to the explana- 

 tion of variation, just as another was by Huxley when he 

 declared consciousness an insoluble problem. In every 

 science great discoverers have too often delayed progress 

 as much by authoritative unsound opinion as they have 

 advanced it. Every Bible is first a book of revolution, and 

 then a refuge for reaction. Yet no man can possibly know 

 all he should know for the purposes of his own work. 

 This fact affords the only justification for those, who 

 cannot pretend to profound knowledge in any special line, 

 attempting to solve problems which by their nature are 

 beyond the specialist. They may have been able to grasp 

 in a measure the general conclusions of each science, and 

 by a happy, perhaps accidental, combination, show at least 

 part of the forest to those more particularly occupied with 

 the trees themselves, or the flora of the undergrowth. 



It is'remarkable that hitherto no one seems to have made 

 the observation that reaction to an actual, or threatened, 



