PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 625 
A sense organ is not stimulated unless there is a change of rate in the trans- 
ference of energy; and this to be effectual must oceur in most cases with con- 
siderable quickness. If a weak agent is to stimulate, its application must be 
abrupt (Sherrington). Thus the slow changes of barometric pressure on the 
body-surface originate no skin sensations, though such changes of pressure, if 
applied suddenly, are much above the threshold value for touch. A touch excited 
by constant mechanical pressure of slight intensity fades quickly below the 
threshold of sensation. ‘Thus the almost unbearable discomfort which a child 
feels on putting on for the first time a ‘natural’ wool vest fades away, and is no 
longer noticed with continual wear. Thomas a Beckett soon must have become 
oblivious to his hair-shirt, and even to its harbingers. It is not the wind which 
God tempers to the shorn lamb, but the skin of the lamb to the wind. The 
inflow of sensations keeps us active and alive and all the organs working in their 
appointed functions. The cutaneous sensations are of the highest importance. 
The salt and sand of wind-driven sea air particularly act on the skin and through 
it braces the whole body. The changing play of wind, of light, cold, and 
warmth stimulate the activity and health of mind and body. Monotony of 
sedentary occupation and of an overwarm still atmosphere endured for long 
working hours destroys vigour and happiness and brings about the atrophy of 
disuse. We hear a great deal of the degeneration of the race brought about by 
city life, but observation shows us that a drayman, navvy, or policeman can live 
in London, or other big city, strong and vigorous, and no less so than in the 
country. The brain-worker, too, can keep himself perfectly fit if his hours of 
sedentary employment are not too long and he balances these by open-air 
exercise. The horses stabled, worked, and fed in London are as fine as any in 
the world; they do not live in windless rooms heated by radiators. 
The hardy men of the North were evolved to stand the vagaries of climate— 
cold and warmth—a starved or full belly have been their changing lot. The 
full belly and the warm sun have expanded them in lazy comfort; the cold and 
the starvation have braced them to action. Modern civilisation has withdrawn 
many of us from the struggle with the rigours of Nature; we seek for and 
mostly obtain the comfort of a full belly and expand all the time in the warm 
Atmosphere afforded us by clothes, wind-protected dwellings, and artificial heat— 
particularly so in the winter, when the health of the business man deteriorates. 
Cold is not comfortable, neither is hunger, therefore we are led to ascribe many 
of our ills to exposure to cold, and seek to make ourselves strong by what is 
termed good living. I maintain that the bracing effect of cold is of supreme 
importance to health and happiness, that we become soft and flabby and less 
resistant to the attacks of infecting bacteria in the winter not because of ihe cold 
but because of our excessive precautions to preserve ourselves from cold; that 
the prime cause of ‘cold’ or ‘chill’ is not really exposure to cold but to the 
over-heated and confined air of rooms, factories, and meeting-places. Seven 
hundred and eleven survivors were saved from the Titanic after hours of 
exposure to cold. Many were insufficiently clad and others wet to the skin. 
Only one died after reaching the Carpathia, and he three hours after being 
picked up. Those who died perished from actual cooling of the body. Exposure 
to cold did not cause in the survivors the diseases commonly attributed to cold. 
Conditions of city and factory life diminish the physical and nervous energy, 
and reduce many from the vigerous health and perfectness of bodily functions 
which a wild animal possesses to a more secure, but poorer and far less happy, 
form of existence. ‘The ill chosen diet, the monotony and sedentary nature of 
daily work, the winiless uniformity of atmosphere, above all, the neglect of 
vigorous muscular exercise in the open air and exposure to the winds and light 
of heaven—all these, together with the difficulties in the way of living a normal 
sexual life, go to make the pale, undeveloped, neurotic, and joyless citizen. 
Nurture in unnatural surroundings, not Nature’s birth-mark, moulds the criminal 
and the wastrel. The environment of childhood and youth is at fault rather 
than the stock; the children who are taken away and trained to be sailors, those 
sent to agricultural pursuits in the Colonies, those who become soldiers, may 
develop a physique and bodily health and vigour in striking contrast to their 
brothers who become clerks, shop assistants, and compositors. 
Too much stress cannot be put on the importance of muscular exercise in 
1912. ss 
