Once upon a time there was a little boy whose parents took things very seriously. They answered all his questions with painstaking precision. At a comparatively early age he could prove that fairies were non-existent. At the same time his toys were marvels of mechanical perfection.
At the age of seven he was sent to a very efficient school, where, being naturally a bright boy, he gained high marks every term and passed all the examinations, for he had a wonderful and well-trained faculty for remembering exactly what his teachers had told him.
When he left school he entered a London merchant's office, where his knowledge of arithmetic was of the greatest assistance in bringing him to the front. Moreover, he could argue very tellingly with all the clerks and warehousemen, and always knew what the morning papers were saving about health, neck-ties or religion.
In course of time he grew a moustache, joined the Territorials, was made a partner in the firm, married a well-educated young lady and became a strong supporter of the local Liberal Club, where his opinions were so well known that it was unnecessary for anyone seriously to combat them. He was never known to vote for the Conservative candidate or to lose his head. His concluding speech in the historic debate on The National Health Insurance Act will always be remembered, by those who heard it, for its earnest defence of the medical profession. In fact, the Mayor, who was in the chair, and was a doctor himself, warmly congratulated the speaker, who was evidently very pleased.
Ten years later he became a Town Councillor, opened several Institutes for the Care of the Poor, and sent his second son to join the eldest at the same kind of school at which he (the father) had been so well trained. About the same date he bought a new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica and carefully compiled a list of facts and figures showing that idealists and all new-fangled ideas were the greatest danger to the increasing trade and expansion of the Empire.
At the age of fifty he took a house at Surbiton and was continually congratulated on his hale and hearty appearance. His opinions were known and respected by all who met him. His sons were models of what the children of such a father should be, and they supported him in every argument.
At the age of fifty-two he retired from business. A month later he had an idea; and it so interfered with all his opinions, and so affected his general health, that he died.
Edgar J. Saxon.
A SIGNIFICANT CASE—II.
He stopped smoking tobacco on the second day, and does not mean to resume its use. Of course he had no alcohol in any form during the fast, but he never has taken much alcohol, although he was not a pledged abstainer. The temperature was taken many times and seems to have been almost always subnormal, about 97 degrees Fahr., but this is not so unusual a condition as to call for comment. The chief cause of a subnormal temperature, in my opinion, is blocking of the body with too much food. No doubt in prolonged fasting the temperature may fall also; but sometimes a fast will be the cause of raising a subnormal bodily temperature, as happened in a case of mine in which on the twenty-eighth day of the fast there was a large elimination of urates by the kidneys and a rise of temperature from 96 degrees to 98.4 degrees. Subnormal bodily temperature has not received the attention which it deserves. It is usually one of the forerunners, or prodromata as they are called, of the onset of incurable diseases like cancer, Bright's disease or apoplexy. The commonly accepted view that the heat of the body depends upon the food, and that people eat blubber in the Arctic and Antarctic regions to keep the bodily heat up, is one of the chief causes for neglect of the study of subnormal temperature. And it is quite surprising that physiologists have not thought it necessary to explain why nature has provided sugar and palm oil and cocoa-nut oil and ground-nut oil in the tropical regions, as well as abundance of olive oil in the warm temperate regions of the earth if these foods keep the bodily heat up. They ought to have been more abundantly supplied in the Arctic and Antarctic regions if the accepted view is correct. Besides, if we must eat blubber to keep bodily heat up in the Arctic regions when the outside temperature is 50 or 100 or more degrees lower than that of the body, what ought we to eat in the tropics to keep bodily heat down when the outside temperature is 50 or even 80 degrees above that of the body? Physiologists have not explained this, although assuredly an explanation is wanted. But the true explanation, the correct explanation, would have demolished the doctrine that bodily heat is due to the food, and so it has not been given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a fit dwelling-place for itself—this explanation is too simple and too idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for electric and chemic phenomena. Modern science (and ancient science, too, apparently) which sees well enough that an idealistic or a materialistic explanation would equally account for the nexus of the phenomena of the universe, deliberately and almost invariably prefers the materialistic explanation. She is anxious that we should be kept free of superstition. But the superstition that forces are the effects of things does not seem to distress her at all. And so we are told that gravitation is a property of matter, and are forbidden to think that perhaps gravitation, a force, procreates matter, a thing, in order that the effects of the fore may be perceived by dull sense. We are told that the function of the liver and the brain depends on the structure of the liver and the brain respectively and we are not allowed to think that perhaps the force of animal life, feeling the need of an instrument to secrete bile, on the one hand, and to secrete cerebral lymph to act as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought and emotion and higher things, on the other, introduces the liver with its elaborate structure and the brain with its still more complicated structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower. Properly speaking, science is out of her sphere, though she does not seem to know it, in making these suggestions. When she keeps herself to the investigation of facts, their exposition, their sequence and their laws, in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept her revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life.