of the stomach. Atropine triumphs over spasmodic pains. Against the latter I also recommend flannel compresses soaked with camphorated alcohol and put over the gastric region. This is an insignificant remedy but one which I have never failed to use with success in a practice of more than thirty years, and with which I have calmed the pains of thousands suffering with gastralgia. If the spasms persist, you can relax the muscular tunic and the twinging pains of the nervous plexus by a hot douche, that is, one devoid of any percussive force. The fluid extract of parsley was much vaunted of late, by Sardou, as an excellent antispasmodic for the stomach. I prefer, especially in females, a mixture of the tincture of senecio and an ethereal tincture of valerian in doses of one to two teaspoonfuls in sweetened mentholized water.

The appetite is the neuromuscular, moving cause of the stomach. The part of the kitchen is precisely to arouse the appetite, by its aromas, and to stimulate the psychic gastric secretions of which Pawlow speaks as veritable antagonists of anorexia. The bitter saliva and the polydigestive granules (strychnine arsenite, 1-2 milligram; amorphous quassin, 5 milligrams; pure papaine, 2 1-2 centigrams) are the precious agents that set in motion that eupepsia which, by a pushing force, continues to act of its own accord. All other condiments irritate the digestive mucous membranes by their essential principles. The dyspeptic must always be careful of what he eats, and must avoid gormandizing, for which he has to pay dearly. DR. E. MONIN, in La Dosimetrie.

[To be Continued.]

THE BULGARIAN BACILLUS

Jean Effront said that this bacillus differs from the Bertrand bacillus in its strong proteolytic action. It produces in the milk a great quantity of volatile acids and changes the casein in such a way that the milk becomes a transparent brightyellow fluid which turns more and more dark, while the Bertrand bacillus, although it acidifies the milk strongly, forms rela

tively few volatile acids and transforms the casein but imperfectly.

The different results from these two microbes do not arise because they are biologically different, but because of certain culture conditions which produce a biochemical variety. When the Bulgarian bacillus is grown in normal milk, it retains all its qualities, but it changes considerably with the manner of the admission of air (lueftung) and the alkalinity of the fluid. The medicinal results from the use of the Bulgarian bacillus do not come simply from the lactic acid formed, but from the constant presence of proteolytic effects. Compt. Rend., 152, 463, in Pharm. Zentralh., 1911, p. 502.

THE CHANGES IN FOODS BY EXPOSURE TO COLD

The changes in frozen meat consist in loss of weight from the loss of water, which after four months amounts to from 7 to 11 percent, and after nine months from 12 to 23 percent. There is also a loss of juice, which escapes when the meat thaws, and also a loss of the red corpuscles, through their disintegration and removal. Deterioration, however, or diminution of nutrition value do not take place. The loss of weight in cooled meat, by the loss of water, is greater when it is cut into small pieces and less when in quarters or halves of the carcass. Cooled meat brought into the open air putrefies rapidly, because moisture precipitates on it by sudden changes of temperature, and the disintegration of the muscular tissue favors the penetration of bacteria into the deeper parts.

The freezing of fish influences the meat unfavorably because of the loosening of the muscular segments. The best temperature at which to keep fish fresh is at zero.

The freezing of milk differs from that of water. The frozen part of the milk consists of lamellæ of ice, loosely held together, which hold the unfrozen fluid part of the milk between them. This fluid part usually contains the greatest part of the fat. Suedd. Apoth. Ztg., 1910, 726.

I

A DANGEROUS DOCTRINE

HAVE read through more than once Dr. Robinson's article on "The Limitation of Offspring," and always with painful interest and increasing disgust. The member of your staff, whose comment appears on page 582, emphasizes the gruesome purpose of the aforesaid writer, although the fellow member, expressing his views on the following page, undertakes a mild rebuke, evidently with the intention of keeping the pages of CLINICAL MEDICINE clean and wholesome for the table in the physician's office and the fireside of his home.

The answer to Dr. Robinson, as printed on page 583, is so temperately and completely done that I hesitate to enter the lists, for it is a master of self-restraint who can essay a reply to such wicked and dangerous dogma with patience and calmness when promulgated by a member of his own household, a member of his own honored profession: wicked, because in essence it advocates the spirit of murder; dangerous, because it seeks to break down the thin line between a savage state and our civilization and to upset the balance of nature. It helps a condition already too much in evidence.

I have been in the practice of medicine for many years. I have a fair information

of the rise, career and fall of nations, powers and principalities since history was written, and I know that such pernicious teachings and practices, coupled with other like habits, were factors in their ultimate undoing. Also, I have a fair knowledge of the times and writings of my professional colleagues from the days of old Hippocrates to Osler and Wier Mitchell, but, offhand, I do not remember the spreading of a doctrine or dogma by any of these great men so dangerous to public morals, and doubly so in a time like this in our social, money-mad, national life, a period so damnably wicked in the encouragement of vice.

One who would deliberately interfere with the laws of nature in the legitimate procreation of offspring, whether in the palace of the rich or in the home of poverty with its one lone vine trailed over the door, is an enemy to public safety, for he initiates social corruption and encourages it, and turns a holy nuptial bed into a bed of legalized prostitution. One need not strike the fatal blow to be a murderer; one may be personally clean and still be a menace to society.

In introducing his article on "The Limitation of Offspring," Dr. Robinson recites that "the entire progress of the human race has been due to unusual

things." Yes, and no one will dispute that his wicked and foolish notion is an "unusual" thing, and one wonders whether the man is in his right mind. Then about these "unusual" things he says: "If Spinoza had not thought some unusual thoughts, we might still be cherishing the free-will fetish; if Morse, Stephenson and Fulton had not thought some unusual thoughts, we should not have had the telegraph, the railway, the steamboat." Many more he mentions of the world's benefactors, and he might also have added that if Thaw had not thought some unusual thoughts, he would not have shot to death White, the architect. And so Dr. Robinson's unusual thoughts prompt him to advocate crime.

And now let me ask Dr. Robinson, where would be Spinoza and his philosophy, where would be Morse, Stephenson, and Fulton, their telegraph, railways and steamboats, if their mothers had declined to give them birth, or if some red-handed abortionist had advised their fathers how best to perform the act of intercourse so as to escape the natural consequences? Where would be Carroll, Reed, Lazear, and Agramonte, whose lives were a benediction to plague-swept Cuba and whose. names are safely with the immortals while time endures, and maybe forever in the Valhalla of eternity.

If Dr. Robinson's mischievous doctrine should obtain, how long would it be before the physical manhood and womanhood of our people would degenerate; how long the laborer, in whom he is so much concerned, would become a member of the army of tramps because there are no children's voices to call him home, a home whose threshold is overgrown with mosses because there is no impression of little feet upon it?

Such lax regard for instinctive morals. would lead directly to unrestrained license, and this inevitably to a complete dissolution of our civilization. In that decline and racial destruction, we should sink to the level of the once illustrious Egyptian, but our own wild savage of the plains would have none of us-he does not do such things as Dr. Robinson suggests.

The brightest men and women, and the best, come up from the home of poverty crowded with children. The pernicious doctrine advocated by Dr. Robinson has been secretly taught and tentatively promulgated ever since the captains of finance were permitted to be the masters of the people, imitators among whom, not having the financial ability or opportunity to get rich quick, seek to beat the game by eliminating the children.

And so matrimony and its holy bed would be solely for the base gratification of lust, with no thought of higher aims and ambitions! What chaos would revel in the land if the laws of the states should institute such a plan! In contemplating the duly legalized limitation of offspring, a picture rises before me. I see written over the door of the physician, the quack, and what-not-for all these kith would be on a common level: "Abortions carefully and cheaply done here." The teachings of prevention are allied to abortion, and these to murder.

Ogden, Utah.

A. S. CONDON.

POVERTY AND PROGENY

The article in your journal on the limitation of offspring, by William J. Robinson, M. D., was called to my attention by a friend. Being interested in the social problems of today, I beg leave to express my opinion.

The method chosen by the author, for the amelioration of the economic pressure in the substratas of society, is rather a startling one, inasmuch as the most scrutinizing sociologists have, in turn, eliminated large families as the causative factor in financial submergence.

There are many and diverse opinions as to what method should be employed for this social adjustment. That is why one can very easily lose himself in the labyrinth of opinion, and failing in the search for the right one, will stab at a healthy part and further complicate mat

ters.

Following the author's contentions as closely as possible, I must confess that our

observations on this subject are very much divergent from each other.

As to the attitude of the poor parent to the advent of a third or fourth child, I, myself, in my own experience, have not met with any such distressing and inhuman scenes as quoted by Robinson.

Every physician no doubt is frequently consulted by patients entertaining abortion thoughts. I had my share, but although a third or a fourth conception is dreaded and fought against, yet, when actually conceived, it takes a pretty hardened woman or perverted maternal instinct to have recourse to miscarriage or to curse the unborn offspring when she becomes aware of life within her. Such women are really more debased by rum or abuse from drunken husbands than by poverty and repeated pregnancies. They are not even fit for the care of one child.

If a woman, no matter how poor, has the moral fitness for motherhood, repeated pregnancies do not degenerate her nor do they appreciably change her economic condition.

In a great many instances I have casually addressed myself to the factory man, the rag peddler, the shoemaker, questioning the advisability of raising such a large family, and I am pleased to say that the answers are essentially the same.

"Of course, doctor, it is hard on a poor man, but what can you do? Another little mouth to feed, true; but it won't make me, and it won't break me."

And the man is right, with few exceptions, they become reconciled before the little one is born. It is the same povertystricken father of four who stands there with trembling anxiety and curbed impatience waiting for the cry of the fifth, and then rushes out to notify his relatives.

A young mother came in the other week with a few-months-old youngster to have him vaccinated.

"How is it you did not call me for your confinement?" I inquired reproachfully. "Well, doctor," she answered, somewhat embarrassed, "I was a little angry at you because you did not help me when I was a few weeks overdue. You see, if we could afford another baby it would be different;

but my husband is a hard-working and poorly paid man."

"Is the baby in your way now?"

"Why, doctor," the woman blurted out, flushing and tenderly caressing the thing in her arms, "I would not part with him for a million dollars!"

I do not know of any family whose standard of living has declined apace with the successive advent of children, unless the change had been directly brought about by business reverses or parental incompatibility.

Now a word as to the future fitness of those reared among the poor.

Unfortunately I have not had the time to look up the biographies of all the eminent men quoted at the beginning of the author's paper. But I venture to say, and with safety, I am sure, that a large percentage of them were lowly born and members of large families.

Run through the list of our great American financiers, and you will find them in the first chapter of their career knocking from door to door with a pack on their back. Turn the pages back to the childhood of our presidents, and you will find a few log cabins among the homesteads they called their's.

Though poverty is a serious obstacle toward advancement and many among the poor are victims of filth, want and disease, yet, somehow, a large proportion wriggle out of it and manage to sit with the exalted of the land.

From a young man lowly born, struggling for an existence, fighting adversity, you may expect something, for in his struggles he develops a moral and mental antitoxin to such diseases as indolence, oversatiation, and all the other afflictions of the rich. Driven by want, his mentality becomes active, and if perchance there is a seed of ambition in his make-up, it usually germinates and the man gives a good account of himself. On the other hand, from one born on silk and satin, pampered and degenerated by excessive indulgence, saturated with inherited rot, you can expect nothing good.

The poor are too busy to give themselves up to bridge, balls, pink teas, and killing

feasts. It is true that the little ones go barefooted and roll in the gutter, but at the humble fireside they are folded into the bosom of a real mother, filled with unlimited affection. The motherly influence to make good men and good women is there, be there one child, or five, or

more.

The law of the survival of the fittest does not cover the little ones of the rich, but it does operate among the poor, and the fittest in the struggle in a large number of instances reach the top notch. These very same little ones, with very few exceptions, more than justify their existence. Their family ties are stronger, their devotion to each other is greater, their social instinct of altruism is fostered. It is a common occurrence to see a whole family catering hysterically to the wants of a brother, sister or parent who has suddenly met with some misfortune.

Does it pay to have many children? A little hard on the parent, maybe, but indispensable to the state.

In the process of evolution, hundreds, and thousands, of lives must be sacrificed for the sake of attaining perfection. In the process of natural selection, the discarded residue must of necessity be great.

The law of evolution destroys, and it creates, as it goes on. The product becomes finer, and finer, and ever finer.

Of the million lives brought into the world, thousands fulfil their cycle in obscurity, thousands become useful to the community, and only a few hundred emerge, endowed with the highest possible mental development. It is this handful, these hundreds, that constitute the naturally selected ones, and it is for these hundreds that other thousands upon thousands must be sacrificed. It is the toll that evolution exacts from humanity. And yet, truthfully speaking, these thousands are not really sacrificed, for they play their part in the cosmic laboratory, as they make up the humble pill-mass of mankind, of which these hundreds are the potent alkaloid.

The legalization for the dissemination of anticonceptional knowledge does not ring logical to me.

The trouble is, not an overabundance of poor children, but an overabundance of political, economic and social weakness.

It is against the present morbid social metabolism that your cannons must be directed.

A community that permits the existence of two extreme opposing classes, one choking with wealth, the other choking with polluted air in a twenty-family tenement house, needs to have the searchlight of common sense directed upon it.

The investigation into causes that lead to extreme wealth on the one hand, and to extreme poverty on the other, will elucidate a great many problems that bother the poor heads of some social reformers. ZELLY A. BONOFF.

New Haven, Conn.

THE LIMITATION OF OFFSPRING

Dr. William J. Robinson's dissertation upon the limitation of offspring touches the greatest question of modern civilization with respect to the happiness and physical welfare of the human race. The problem involved is the chit and the tap-root of all that is physically good for mankind. But Dr. Robinson's almost total ignorance of the subject is so grossly manifest that it is fearful to contemplate. The Doctor limits. himself to ocular impressions and manifestations, instead of going to the root of the subject and the real causes of the physical deterioration of a nation. I will be brief.

First: The limitation of offspring has emphatically nothing to do with the subject.

Second: Sometimes large families are delicate and short-lived.

Third: The children of most of our small families are delicate and short-lived, especially among the wealthy and among the hard brain-workers. There is a fundamental reason for this.

Fourth: Most of our great men, sturdy pioneers and long-lived people came from large and poor families. But this proves nothing.

Fifth: I knew a family of eight boys, apparently healthy-looking. The eight boys