42 Transactions-— Miscellaneous. 
done can be roughly measured by tho quantity of phosphates excreted. 
Ohne phospher kein gedunke"—'* Without phosphorus no thought’’—was 
the saying of a German philosopher. If therefore the soil be deficient in 
phosphates, or it be in difficultly disintegratable forms, it must be deficient in 
the cereals and animal food, and the English immigrant eating such cereals 
and such meat will lack phosphorus—be wanting in brain power. A 
nation’s greatness depends chiefly on its brain power, and in the fierce 
struggle for existence it is certain that if the soil of a nation were markedly 
deficient in phosphorus it would succumb to that nation whose soil contained 
it largely. 
The great geologist Lyell tells us that at the mouth of a land-locked sea 
a bar was raised, that the water became brackish, and that the oysters and 
fish grew scarce. As oysters and fish contain large quantities of phospho- 
rus, this elevation of a single strip of land actually affected the thought 
power of the coastal people. : 
The quantity of lime in the soil will affect the colonial born, for the 
bones owe their rigidity to the amount of lime they contain. If this lime 
be not supplied in proper quantity in the food, the cartilagenous rods bend 
under the weight of the body, and then are seen the crooked rickety limbs 
so common among the London poor. On the other hand goitre and 
cretinism are by learned pathologists attributed to a superabundance of 
lime in the water, and thus explain it:—At birth the bones of the base of 
the skull are soft and expand with the growth of the brain, and not till 
aiter some years do they become completely ossified, i. e., rendered hard 
and unyielding. In eretins the temporal sphenoid and occipital bones 
ossify early, and the brain shut in a rigid case cannot develop, hence 
cretinism and goitre result. 
Last year, at the British Association, a Mr. Cooper showed that the 
mental condition of nations varied with amount and varieties of inorganic 
impurities in their drinking water, and that all their social, politieal, and 
religious qualities might be changed by these impurities. 
further and says that by analyzing 
Thus for example, 
glish skeletons, we 
water of the Waikato or of the Severn. And though Mr. Cooper's theory 
of impurities in water affect a nation’s political, social, and religious life, 
yet really there is nothing physiologically objectionable in the theory, for 
we know that certain things, as opium, alcohol, tea, indian hemp, &e., do 
powerfully stimulate or depress men's brains. Indeed, Sir J. Mackintosh 
