Vol. XXX.

FOR generations doctors sensed that pneumonia is a catching, that is, a germ disease, because they found it present pretty regularly in certain houses, in soldiers' barracks, in jails and in schools; they easily traced direct infection in hospital wards; and they recognized epidemics of pneumonia, as of measles or scarlet fever.

But mot until recent years was the germ of pneumonia (doctors call it the "pneumococcus" discovered. In this, as in all germ diseases, two kinds of causes have to be taken into account: first, the presence of the germ which is peculiar to the disease and is its specific cause; and then the predisposition, which weakens the body and makes it the right kind of soil for the germ to thrive in.

You will understand this better by taking the example of a family of half a dozen people. One or two among them will come down with pneumonia, whilst the others will escape. But why don't they all suffer, since in the family relation they must all have been about equally subject to the germinal attack?

The reason is that the bodies of those who have come down were predisposed their resisting power to the germ of the disease was diminished. But in the bodies of those who escaped the organs were sufficiently healthy to triumph over the infection; and those fortunate members of the family had in their blood agencies fight

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ing the pneumococcus and rendering them harmless, and even consuming and destroying them.

These predispositions loom up very large indeed in the doctor's practice; it is a great deal of his duty to find them out and rectify them, if this is possible to be done. The sad thing, however, is that in the dreadful stress of modern life it is impossible always to avoid these predispositions. What are some of them, with especial reference to pneumonia?

Men have a greater tendency to pneumonia than women, because of the greater hardships the family breadwinner has to endure. In the changeable and unsettled months, such as December and March, there is much pneumonia; such months are windy, and dusty, too, and that has a great deal to do with the spread of the pneumonia germs. Cold and wet, especially as to the feet, predispose by lowering the bodily resistance. Then of a cold day a man will go into a stuffy saloon to get himself a hot whiskey punch, and will go right out into the cold again. This will make him sweat and have the effect to open the pores of his skin to the cold; so comes the deadly chill that starts an attack of pneumonia.

But cold itself is not responsible for pneumonia; during the continuous cold of January and February there is not so much of this disease as in the changeable December or March. Arctic explorers never have

pneumonia-anyway, not in the Arcticsbecause the germ does not exist in that pure air; but when they get back to civilization, where the germ abounds, they are just as likely as anybody to succumb.

Fatigue very decidedly predisposes the body to pneumonia; men who must work hard through long hours and in inclement weather are very apt to come down with it. Unhealthy conditions of the upper air passages-catarrhs-tend to to "lung fever." There are chronic diseases of the heart, the liver, the kidneys and the stomach to which pneumonia is a "terminal infection"; that is, they die of pneumonia, to which those other diseases have predisposed them.

An injury to the chest wall may predis pose. Alcoholism is at fault in a sad number of cases; and an alcoholic pneumonia is pretty well-nigh hopeless. There is more pneumonia in the cities than in the country for obvious reasons, but especially because the germ has a better chance to thrive in the city; besides, city people are more irreg ular in their living and they are overcrowded in ill-ventilated tenements.

Well, then, how are we going to prevent pneumonia? In the first place we have to remove the predispositions. That is an easy thing to write down, but a mighty hard thing to do. In this workaday world when the struggle for existence is so intense, it is impossible to remove all the factors that weaken the body and lay it open to the attacks of germs. As for the germ itself, we must act pretty much as we should against the germ of consumption. The sputum is disinfected; those who nurse pneumonia cases must keep their mouths and throats very clean by means of tooth brushes and gargles; they must wash their hands very often and then bathe them in disinfecting solutions. After the patient's recovery or removal his house is disinfected throughout. Those who need not be with pneumonia patients had best not visit them, though, of course, there is no occasion for fright, as if they had the plague. However, people worn out or otherwise susceptible to infection should not unnecessarily expose themselves to pneumococcus infection.

"WHAT'S mind? No matter: What's matter? Never mind." This is Punch's system of philosophy; and it has at least the merit of being incontrovertible-a merit almost absolutely unique in the history of thought.

The relationship of the mind to the body has been no doubt as old a theme for speculation as the nature of mind itself. In fact, until we can discover the nature of mind, and can tell what matter is, until we have explained these ultimates,-we cannot positively solve the puzzle of mind. and matter. It is evident to the man in the street that the mind impresses itself on the body; and the modern psychologist has shown how the body reacts upon the mind. However, in philosophy, there have been from time immemorial two camps

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the metaphysical and the materialistic; and those in these camps have in ages past visited dreadful sufferings upon one another and have fought most bloody wars. between these two camps there are those who have stood for an interaction, a reciprocity, a parallelism of mind and body.

Up to our era the metaphysical viewpoint has generally prevailed. The mind has Edmund Spencer: been everything, as beautifully expressed by

"For of the soul the body form doth take,

For soul is form, and doth the body make."

And by Schopenhauer: "The spirit has all matter to choose from." And yet the metaphysician's view is by no means invulnerable. How is it, asks the material

ist, when the body is for a few minutes deprived of oxygen, when a lethal dose of poison vitiates the life sustaining blood, when a blow stills forever the body's conscious processes; what then has become of your "all-potent mind?" The body remains with all its elements, organs, tissues, processes as before; but there is no longer mind to direct the body's destinies. It has been destroyed by the agencies which have been inimical to the body's functions. Has not, then, this mind been merely one of those destroyed functions, like digestion, bile formation and heart action

And so the materialist holds that life is essentially and merely a psycho-chemical process; that such terms as mind, soul, spirit and the like are only ideas conditioned upon material entities and produced by the brain and nervous system, the physical organs by which mind is evolved.

But here again any philosopher can see that the materialist has bitten off more than he can chew. He leaves the scientific thinker (what is philosophy but the sum of the sciences, or the "knowing" of the cosmos) utterly unsatisfied. The materialist tells us that the mind in its diverse aspects, (reason, intellect, will, emotion), is but the resultant of purely materialistic conditions. The whole thing, he tells us, started in this way: The beginning of life, the sentient existence, was when the sun first shone on and vivified a morsel of primordial protoplasm, in consequence of which that morsel took on a sort of unicellular,

ameboid existence. Thence has been evolv

ed, step by step, aeon after aeon, through various progressively complex stages, the human organism, the most highly "evolved" that we know of; and by and by there is going to be a superman, who will go us one better-and all out of that serrified morsel of protoplasm, and by processes purely psycho-chemical.

The trouble here is that the explanation how that bit of protoplasm became sentient how that bit of protoplasm became sentient is not complete. Like Ko-Ko's narrative, it is bald and unconvincing and lacks veriit is bald and unconvincing and lacks verisimilitude. How did the protoplasm get there? one is entitled to ask; and how did the sun come to shine? How did the sun get there?

The materialist may answer that millions of years ago there existed atoms which under the pressure of gravitation became concentrated into nebulæ, whence were evolved suns, whence in turn planets were thrown

off, upon which certain accumulations of atoms (which we now call matter) took the molecular form of protoplasm, upon which the sun acted. Very well, then; but how did those primal atoms which became nebulæ come into existence?

Then the materialist may answer that these primal atoms were evolved out of space-filling ether. To this one may again respond, with tiresome persistence, and like that insatiable little boy whose curiosity is ungovernable, then how did ether get there? And so on, just as far back as the materialist wants to go.

In short, the real riddle of the universe is as inscrutable to the materialist as it is to any one else; the latter has not solved for us the real mystery of mind.

The materialistic viewpoint was admirably set forth by Professor Shafer in his address on The Origin of Life; in controversion of this came Dr. J. S. Haldane's superb summing up in his address on "Mind and Body": The relation of mind to body is not that psychical phenomena are mere accompaniments of physical processes in the body, nor that there is an interaction of body and an incorporeal mind (parallelism or epiphenomenonism); but that body is conscious personality looked at incompletely or abstractly. In other words, conscious personality is the truth of the body and its environment; and the physical causes, which seem at first sight to determine the mind, are only superficial appearances. This is merely another way of saying that however

little we understand it in detail, our world

is a spiritual world. We are not thereby committed to the absurd position that the personality of the universe is a man's own individual personality, coming into existence at a certain date and disappearing again at a certain other date. Just as biological facts have taught us that the life of each individual cell or organism is only part of a wider life, so have ethical and religious facts shown that the individual personality in its full realization is the expression of divine personality, which alone can be the ultimate truth of all existence. The individual personality, including his ideas of the world and his ideals of conduct, is evidently a product of his time, the expression of a wider personal life, which he only realizes in living it and living it whole, confident in his participation of it and ready to give up his mere individual interests, or even his life itself, should his duty lead him to do so.