ORGANIC DEPENDENCE AND DISEASE 
7 
anyone concerned with the origin of our actual inheritance 
of specific pathological conditions . 1 
It hardly seems necessary to premise that pathological 
conditions, or diseases, to speak specifically, are as much a 
matter of evolution as the human hand or the bird’s wing. 
The statement of so obvious a fact here would have seemed 
superfluous except for the sharp citation recently served 
upon his colleagues by an eminent physician, that “ human 
maladies are but a narrow fringe along the border line of 
disease ,” 2 which would seem to intimate that repetitive 
emphasis may wisely be laid upon this statement. 
In the ancient rock formations and the life assemblages 
with which we are here dealing there are few of these 
higher creatures, the vertebrates, and among them speciali- 
zation in organs and function has gone so far as to becloud 
the record we are seeking to disclose. Here the effort is to 
take the simplest and least differentiated expressions of 
life conditions in their earliest appearance, before the living 
world had become so inexpressibly complicated as it is to- 
day or so indelibly stamped by the accumulated heritage 
of boundless ages. It may be said that these investigations, 
which rest upon the certain results of the laws of life, lead 
the reflective mind into passages tangent to human con- 
cerns of high moment. 
We shall need for the immediate purpose a clear under- 
standing of what is meant by disease , as the term is here 
used. Our employment of the word is a rather loose one; 
probably no physiologist or pathologist would be satisfied 
with it, if indeed the term could be adapted to modern path- 
ological use. It has at best only a popular value and its ap- 
plication is without scientific exactness. Thus, tuberculosis 
1 Roy L. Moodie. 1916, American Journal of Science, v. 41: 530-31; 1916, 
Science, v. 43: 425; 1917, “Annals of Medical History, ” pp. 374-93. 
2 R. G. Eccles. “The Scope of Disease,” Medical Record, March 8, 1913. 
The reader is also referred to Doctor Eccles ’s other important papers in this 
field: “Disease and Genetics,” op. cit., August 2, 1913; “Parasitism and Nat- 
ural Selection,” op. cit., July 31, 1909. 
