“I trust you are not going to keep us long, Quincy,” yawned Burroughs, looking ostentatiously at his watch.
“Only long enough for Professor Kennedy to say a few words about Eugenia,” replied Atherton nervously, bowing to Kennedy.
Kennedy cleared his throat slowly.
“I don’t know that I have much to say,” began Kennedy, still seated. “I suppose Mr. Atherton has told you I have been much interested in the peculiar state of health of Mrs. Atherton?”
No one spoke, and he went on easily: “There is something I might say, however, about the—er—what I call the chemistry of insanity. Among the present wonders of science, as you doubtless know, none stirs the imagination so powerfully as the doctrine that at least some forms of insanity are the result of chemical changes in the blood. For instance, ill temper, intoxication, many things are due to chemical changes in the blood acting on the brain.
“Go further back. Take typhoid fever with its delirium, influenza with its suicide mania. All due to toxins—poisons. Chemistry—chemistry—all of them chemistry.”
Craig had begun carefully so as to win their attention. He had it as he went on: “Do we not brew within ourselves poisons which enter the circulation and pervade the system? A sudden emotion upsets the chemistry of the body. Or poisonous food. Or a drug. It affects many things. But we could never have had this chemical theory unless we had had physiological chemistry—and some carry it so far as to say that the brain secretes thought, just as the liver secretes bile, that thoughts are the results of molecular changes.”
“You are, then, a materialist of the most pronounced type,” asserted Dr. Crafts.
Kennedy had been reaching over to a table, toying with the phonograph. As Crafts spoke he moved a key, and I suspected that it was in order to catch the words.
“Not entirely,” he said. “No more than some eugenists.”