for "new worlds to conquer" has greatly declined. For this reason your incentive to work off the accumulations of table deposition has suffered a marked decline, hence you actually take less exercise habitually than before, a fact that becomes more and more marked with advancing years. But your disposition to exercise has now become subject to another depressing force of a very marked character; you are beginning "to take on flesh; your overcoats have begun to become heavy as if they were becoming padded with a slow addition of shot.

You cannot exercise as you did before without getting out of breath, but you still feel just as well, when in repose-but you regret exceedingly your loss of physical power. The years go on with increasing inability to exercise without discomfort, and the overcoats become more and more thickly padded; the rotundity of belt continually enlarges, and finally a time is reached when some little excitement shall send an extra tension upon those brittle pipes and down you go.

Or another condition of things may be incited in the life-centers. The arterial coats may become so thickened that they can no more act as channels, and hence large areas of brain substance become subject to a diminishing supply of the elixir of life, hence softening of its structure and decline in mental power that may reach imbecility, when you become a tax to others.

How inscrutable, how mysterious are the ways of "Divine Providence" in this matter of the origin and the development of disease!

In my younger days I saw an eminent doctor of divinity go slowly down to death by reason of occluded arteries, in the center of his life. With a splendid

form, with a head and face ideal in classic outline, there was only mind enough left to utter the most imbecilic ideas in classical expression; all else had gone, not even the sense of the need or the propriety of clothing.

In the earlier days of my practice I used to often meet a splendid personality daily upon the streets of my city. His form was elegant in all its outlines, and, with the serenest of mental temperaments, admirably balanced to enjoy life, he was the happiest of men in appearance as he actually was in fact. He was an ideal man in all his family and social relations; and well he could be, for behind all his mental and physical needs was a stomach capable of any amount of taxing without complaint-and why not be cheerful with the sense of physical comfort always perfect?

He too began to take on flesh as he reached the high tide of his life, and from thence on as he took less and less exercise, there began a slow decline in mental power that ultimately reached an almost disabling degree, while still in the prime of a later manhood, for any important professional duties; and but for the supervention of an attack of acute disease, imbecility or a "stroke" would have been the sequel.

How mysterious, how beyond all finding out are the ways of "Divine Providence" in the origin and development of disease of such withering, blasting power over the very center of life itself!

The materia medica can little avail here, for why go to the physician when health seems so perfect; "the sick need the physician," and you are so abidingly well that you never meet him without a suggestion that you are only too happy that you need none of his

wares.

Can there be any preventive measure that would

seem to be of any avail against the bloody, withering hand of apoplexy?

Readers, I will meet you again on this subject, and you of heavy weight shall occupy the front seats, and you lighter weights who may think there is a bare possibility of going down, later on, to arise again with maimed bodies, shall sit next to the front.

LECTURE XVI

EVOLUTION OF DISEASE.

APOPLEXY-ITS ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT-SKIN DISEASES-THE TOBACCO HABIT.

My Friends the Readers :

A few years ago England's greatest preacher went down to a slow death. As he approached the midperiod of life, the "flesh" began to accrete, pound after pound; but his was an eccentric stomach, and hence every meal was a burden of selection, of exclusion. There was an abiding torture of uncertainty as to what foods must or must not be eaten. And so those later years of his great life were burdened with those ills due to a stomach that never had rest, even during the vacations at Mentone.

Had those meals been duly separated until the axman's appetite came, there would have been a close approach to the axman's power of digestion, and the axman's luxurious indifference as to what food to be eaten, if it only met the relishing sense; and between the eating scenes, no matter how widely spaced, there would have been in lack of mental force because of the ample, the undue supply, the burdensome supply, of brain food stored away which was far in advance of any possible need. And so died the great preacher, years before his time.

At that far-off home by the ocean where these lec

tures were reduced to form, there died a few years ago a former fellow-citizen and schoolmate, a lawyer of great ability and profound research; died just at his entrance upon the age of his primest maturity, after a lingering approach to a final sudden death. He too had a stomach, but medical science never hinted to him the need to treat with due consideration a most willing, a most obedient servant.

What would it not be worth to humanity could only some scheme be devised whereby the bloody stroke of apoplexy might be stayed or the withering, blightening grasp of the unseen hand upon the very power-center of life might be relaxed!

How is it that the walls of those life-pipes in the center of life become changed into a crude mixture of lime and fat with the contractile fibers, the lifeguards, powerless to save because slow annihilation had gone on with them? Has there been evolution in all this?

The first step in every disease is the very first moment when digestive balance is lost. With each one of you that evil work began with your very first meal. This meal was taken, forced upon you by the nurse, before Nature made any demand; in due time trouble began, every outcry was interpreted as a signal of hunger, and the oftener you were fed the oftener the solemn stillness of all the air was broken by your nervelacerating music. Your meals all through the first year of your life were regulated by the tunes of crying.

You who were born with good stomachs were the good babies, and you born with the weak were the bad The hapless victims of a heathenish, a barbarous code of dietary ethics; Nature had her revenge by nights turned into days with their taxing cares innu

ones.