xliv PROCEEDINGS. 



known to be insect-borne. Some of these are infantile gastro- 

 enteritis, malaria, yellow-fever, typhus fever, typhoid fever, 

 plague and the ophthalmia of hot countries. 



Science has taught us what infection means, that it 

 is not a vague, indefinable "principle", but a real, living, 

 objective existence, ultra- visible, yet withal capable of 

 being apprehended and sealed down under a microscope, 

 of being recognized as specific, and lastly, happily able to 

 be destroyed by sunlight, heat and certain chemical sub- 

 stances. It is sometimes said that science has added new 

 terrors to our life; it has only done so when misused by the 

 Hounds of Hell; it has rid our communities of those frightful 

 scourges of the Middle Ages, Cholera, the Black Death and 

 the Svveating Sickness, awful in the toll they took of human 

 life, more awful still in their mysteriousness, for they came 

 no man knew whence, and went, no man knew whither. 

 But in the name of precise knowledge, science has arrested 

 these grim spectres, their terrifying masks have been torn 

 from them, and they have been revealed as the lowliest of 

 the fungi, allies of the mushrooms and the moulds which 

 prefer to live in darkness. The pestilence has been dragged 

 into the light of noon-day, disarmed and conquered. 



Science has added no terror to life; but it has rid us of 

 the terror by night, of the pestilence that walketh in darkness. 

 The night of ignorance is fast coming to an end, the bright 

 dawn of the ampler day of exact knowledge is already bursting 

 on the world. 



And the man of science thinks of the future of the com- 

 munity; he sees it self-evident that one hundred sick and 

 weakly children are not likely to grow up to be one hundred 

 robust adults. He reflects that we take the greatest trouble 

 to produce good strains of beef-cattle and milk-cows and 

 dray-horses, prize cats, bulldogs, and canaries. We breed 

 selectively with an end in view for the lower creation; but 

 mankind must be left for evermore to breed by the light 



