Over 40 food-ferments have been found in the liver; there are 5,000,000 red and 30,000 white blood corpuscles in a space as big as a pin's head, each one of which travels a mile a day and lives but a fortnight,
millions of new ones being built up in the bone-marrow every second; a flash of light lasting only one eight-millionth of a second, will stimulate the eye, which can discriminate half a million tints. The ear can distinguish 11,000 tones, and is so sensitive that we hear waves of air less than one sixty-thousandth of an inch long; a mass of almost liquid jelly—for 81 per cent of the brain is water, and Aristotle thought it was a wet sponge to cool the hot heart—sends out impulses ordering our every thought and act, and stores up memory, we know not how or where.
There are 10,000,000,000 of cells in the brain cortex alone, and 560,000 fibres pass from the brain down the spinal cord.
A clear, watery cell, no larger than the dot on an "i" encloses factors causing genius or stupidity, honesty or roguery, pride or humility, patience or impulsiveness, coldness or ardour, tallness or shortness, form of head or hands, colour of eyes and hair, male or female sex, and the thousand details that make a man.
Yet man uses this marvellous mechanism but carelessly, and the widespread poverty, the worry and discord in the lives of the happiest, our ignorance, the evil habits we contract, and the vice, miseries, diseases and labours to which most expectant mothers are too often exposed, explain why one baby in every eight never walks; why but four of them live to manhood; why less than 40 years is now man's average span; and why this brief space is filled with suffering and misery, from which many escape by self-destruction.
Sound children do not come from unclean air, surroundings, habits, pursuits, passions and parents. Children conceived in unsuitable surroundings by unsuitable parents, die; must die;
ought to die. They are not built for the stern battle of life.
"Where the sun does not enter, the doctor does!"
—Italian proverb.