630 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION 1. 
of the human body are neglected, and education—when the outside field of 
iuterest is narrowed—intensifies the sensitivity to the bodily conditions. The 
sensations arising within the body—proprioceptive sensations—come to have too 
large a share in consciousness in comparison with exteroceptive. In place of 
considering the lilies how they grow, or musing on the beauty and motions of 
the heavenly bodies, the sedentary worker in the smoke-befouled atmosphere, 
with the limited activity and horizon of an office and a disturbed digestion, tends 
to become confined to the inward consideration of his own viscera and their 
motions, 
Many of the educated daughters of the well-to-do are no less confined at 
home; they are the flotsam and jetsam cast up from the tide in which all others 
struggle for existence—their lives are no less monotonous than the sweated semp- 
stress ov clerk. They become filled with ‘vapours’ and some seek excitement 
not in the cannon’s mouth but in breaking windows, playing with fire, and 
hunger strikes. The dull monotony of idle social functions, shopping and amuse- 
ment no less than that of sedentary work and an asexual life, impels to a 
simulated struggle—a theatrical performance, the parts of which are studied from 
the historical romances of revolution. Each man, woman, and child in the world 
must find the wherewithal for living, food, raiment, warmth, and housing, or 
must die or get some other to find it for him. It seems to me as if the world is 
conducted as if ten men were on an island—a microcosm—and five sought for the 
necessaries of life, hunted for food, built shelters and fires, made clothes of 
skins, while the other five strung necklaces of shells, made loin-cloths of butterfly 
wings, gambled with knuckle-bones, drew comic pictures in the sand, or carved 
out of clay frightening demons, and so beguiled from the first five the larger 
share of their wealth. In this land of factories, while the many are confined to 
mean streets and wretched houses, possessing no sufficiency of baths and clean 
clothing, and are ill-fed, they work all day long, not to fashion for themselves 
better houses and clothing, but to make those unnecessaries such as ‘ the fluff’ 
of women’s apparel, and a thousand trifles which relieve the monotony of the idle 
and bemuse their own minds. 
The discovery of radium and its disintegration as a source of energy has 
enabled the physicist to extend Lord Kelvin’s estimate of the world’s age from 
some thirty to a thousand million years. Arthur Keith does not hesitate to give 
a million of these years to man’s evolution. Karl Pearson speaks of hundreds 
of thousands of years. The form of the human skull, the brain capacity of man, 
his skill as evidenced by stone implements and cave drawings of animals in 
action, was the same tens of thousands of years ago as now. For ages primitive 
man lived as a wild animal in tropical climes, discovered how to make fire, 
clothe himself in skins, build shelters, and so enable himself to wander over the 
temperate and arctic zones. Finally, in the last few score of years, he has made 
houses draughtless with glass windows, fitted them with stoves and radiators, 
and every kind of device to protect himself from cold, while he occupies himself 
in the sedentary pursuits and amusements of a city life. How much better, to 
those who know the boundless horizon of life, to be a frontiers-man and enjoy 
the struggle, with body hardened, perfectly fit, attuned to Nature, than to be 
a cashier condemned to the occupation of a sunless, windless pay-box. The 
city child, however, nurtured and educated in confinement, knows not the large- 
ness and wonders of Nature, is used to the streets with their ceaseless move- 
ment and romantic play of artificial light after dark, and does not need the 
commiseration of the country mouse any more than the beetle who lives in the 
dark and animated burrows of his heap. But while outdoor work disciplines the 
body of the countryman into health, the town man needs the conscious attention 
and acquired educated control of his life to give him any full measure of health 
and happiness. 
Experimental evidence is strongly in favour of my argument that the chemical 
purity of the air is of no importance. Analyses show that the oxygen in the 
worst-ventilated school-room, chapel, or theatre is never lessened by more than 
one per cent, of an atmosphere ; the ventilation through chink and cranny, chimney, 
door, and window, and the porous brick wall, suffices to prevent a greater diminu- 
tion. So long as there is present a partial pressure of oxygen sufficient to change 
