WAVES OF HEAT AND WAVES OF DEATH. 
183 
In these calculations nothing seems to be wanting that 
should render them trustworthy ; they result from inquiries 
conducted on the largest scale ; they have been computed by 
our greatest authority in vital statistics^ and they accord with 
what we gather from common daily observation ; they supply^ 
in a word^ the scientific details and refinements of a rough 
estimate founded on universal experience^ and they lead us 
to thmk very gravely on many subjects which may not have 
occurred to us before^ and which are as cmfious as they are 
absorbing. 
We often hear small moralizers^ who know little or nothing 
about vital phenomena — ^by which term I mean nothing myste- 
riouSj but simply the physics embraced in those phenomena 
which we connect with form and motion under the generic^term_, 
life^ — we often hear^ I say^ small moralizers harp on the one 
strings that man knows nothing of the laws of life and death. 
But what an answer to such presumption of ignorance do the 
facts rendered above supply ! Why_, life and death are here 
reduced on given conditions to reasonings as abstract and 
positive as are the reasonings on the atomic theory^ or the 
development of force by the combustion of fuel. It is not 
necessary for the vital philosopher to go out into the towns 
and villages to take a new census of deaths to enable him to 
give us his readings of the general mortality under this one 
specific state. He may sit in his cabinet now^ and as he reads 
day by day his thermometer^ predict results. There is a fall 
of temperature that shall be known by experience to be suffi- 
ciently deep and prolonged to cause an increase of one 
death in a given community amongst those who have reached 
thirty years. Is it so ? Then there have died sixty-four^ in 
proportion to that one of those who have reached eighty-four 
years. This is a good reflection_, and it leads to another 
refiection^ not so good. It leads one to ask what^ if the law 
be so definite^, are curative and joreventive medicines doing 
meanwhile^ that they should not disturb it ? I fear that they do 
not even produce perturb ations_, and I do not see how they 
could at this moment ; because^ as the truth opens itself to 
the mind^ the enormous external change in the forces of the 
universe that leads to the result^ is not to be grappled wnth or 
interfered with on any efficient known method of human kind 
or invention. The cause is too general, too overwhelming, 
too grasping. It is like the lightning stroke in its distance 
from our command ; but it is diffused, not pointed and concen- 
trate ; prolonged, not instantaneous ; and, by virtue of these 
properties, it is so much the more subtle and devastating. 
At first it seems very easy to explain the reason why a 
sudden fall in temperature should lead to an increase in the 
