304 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
seems to be kept within bounds in the vigorous 
bird may increase sevenfold, spreading, for instance, 
to new organs, and this may give the death-blow. 
We submit, however, that in wild Nature, “ un- 
tainted by man’s misery,” as Shelley said, health 
and disease do not “keep house together in indis- 
soluble partnership.” As to the alleged occurrence 
of caries in Permian fossil-fishes and osteomyelitis 
in a cave-bear, perhaps it is not unjustifiable to 
regard such cases with a little suspicion. 
In the second place, are we not a little apt to 
forget what has been recently emphasized in Pro- 
fessor J. G. Adami’s interesting and courageous 
Medicial Contributions to the Study of Evolution 
(1918), that certain uncomfortable bodily processes, 
often included under the category of disease, are 
the organism’s efforts to adjust itself to what is in 
man’s case an extraordinarily subtle and changeful 
environment—in great part very artificial? Thus 
against the old view of inflammation as essentially 
an injurious process leading to the destruction of 
tissue, we have the modern view, firmly associated 
with the work of Metchnikoff, that inflammation 
is a response or reaction to an intruding irritant, 
and tends to counteract its deleterious effects. 
The reaction may be inadequate or excessive, for 
the organism cannot be perfectly adapted to every 
casualty. But inflammation is none the less in the 
direction of repair and self-preservation. What we 
should marvel at is not human disease, but the 
many-sidedness of our power of counteracting the 
