of reproductive health to the total amount of reproductive disease.  They recklessly spent their best; we sedulously conserve our worst; and as they pined and died of anaemia, so we, unless we repent, must perish in a paroxysm of black-blood apoplexy.  And this prospect becomes more certain, when you reflect that the physician as we know him is not, like other men and things, a being of gradual growth, of slow evolution:  from Adam to the middle of the last century the world saw nothing even in the least resembling him.  No son of Paian he, but a fatherless, full-grown birth from the incessant matrix of Modern Time, so motherly of monstrous litters of “Gorgon and Hydra and Chimaeras dire”; you will understand what I mean when you consider the quite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics or antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood.  We are at this very time, if I mistake not, on the verge of new insights which will enable man to laugh at disease—­laugh at it in the sense of over-ruling its natural tendency to produce death, not by any means in the sense of destroying its ever-expanding existence.  Do you know that at this moment your hospitals are crammed with beings in human likeness suffering from a thousand obscure and subtly-ineradicable ills, all of whom, if left alone, would die almost at once, but ninety in the hundred of whom will, as it is, be sent forth “cured,” like missionaries of hell, and the horrent shapes of Night and Acheron, to mingle in the pure river of humanity the poison-taint of their protean vileness?  Do you know that in your schools one-quarter of the children are already purblind?  Have you gauged the importance of your tremendous consumption of quack catholicons, of the fortunes derived from their sale, of the spread of modern nervous disorders, of toothless youth and thrice loathsome age among the helot-classes?  Do you know that in the course of my late journey to London, I walked from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner, during which time I observed some five hundred people, of whom twenty-seven only were perfectly healthy, well-formed men, and eighteen healthy, beautiful women?  On every hand—­with a thrill of intensest joy, I say it!—­is to be seen, if not yet commencing civilisation, then progress, progress—­wide as the world—­toward it:  only here—­at the heart—­is there decadence, fatty degeneration.  Brain-evolution—­and favouring airs—­and the ripening time—­and the silent Will of God, of God—­all these in conspiracy seem to be behind, urging the whole ship’s company of us to some undreamable luxury of glory—­when lo, this check, artificial, evitable.  Less death, more disease—­that is the sad, the unnatural record; children especially—­so sensitive to the physician’s art—­living on by hundreds of thousands, bearing within them the germs of wide-spreading sorrow, who in former times would have died.  And if you consider that the proper