AND ENVIRONMENT 45 



a campaign which pays no regard to heredity will mate- 

 rially accelerate the fall which has been in progress 

 for at least 60 years in the phthisis death-rate, and 

 which at seasons went on just as rapidly before men 

 were familiar with the tubercle bacillus or had adopted 

 modern methods of treatment ? In the ultimate court of 

 appeal the only evidence admissible is that of facts 

 exhibited in adequately treated statistics, and the public 

 must in the end tire of mere words and demand 

 numerical data for the faith that is in the men who 

 admit no hereditary factor in phthisis. 



Dr. Lister, in a lecture delivered only a few weeks 

 ago, spoke as follows : 



' But the individual resistance of the patient — his rela- 

 tive immunity — is an unknown factor, and so statistical 

 experts riddle the results of sanatorium treatment with 

 criticism, while unable to tell us what better to do' 

 {Lancet, March 9, 1912). 



In the first place, why are statistical experts called upon 

 to find something better to do, when Nature is solving 

 the problem for us ? It is a counsel of despair to spend 

 millions when you have no evidence of the efficiency 

 of the expenditure, because you have nothing better to 

 propose. In the next place, why should we do some- 

 thing ineffectual because we have nothing better to do ? 

 To practise the ineffectual as if it were a proven cure 

 checks the road to better things. Admit that there is 

 as yet no cure for phthisis and it incites men to find one, 

 far more actively than to praise existing * cures '. 



But Eugenists really have something better to pro- 

 pose. No one can study the pedigrees of pathological 

 states, insanity, mental defect, albinism, &c., collected by 

 our Laboratory, without being struck by the large 



