acuteness of intellect, from some slow wasting disease. I frequently saw her in this last illness, not as her physician but as her friend, and I never saw any decline in quickness of perception or in interest in all her human affairs; yet on that last day of her life the muscle and fat tissue of the arms had seemingly totally disappeared. And the skeleton condition was hard by. Fifteen minutes before death she asked for the time, and when the beginning of the end was reached she knew that it had come. She said she was dying.

Could this have been with a brain also wasted by disease? The little starved boy was mentally clear to within an hour of his death. Could this have been with a wasted brain?

Listeners, readers everywhere, have I gone "daft" on this particular subject, or is there a mighty physiological fact under process of unfolding?

In the case of my patient there was a gradual development all along the lines of wasted tissue, and it did not cease for many months-not until ten pounds of solid tissue had been added to the ordinary weight of more than a score of years. This case occurred some seven years ago, and, though he has had two or three light attacks since, he was always able to trace them to an avoidable cause, and now, in his 70th year, after an average lifetime of martyrdom, he recently informed me that he considers himself strictly a well man. And all through a higher obedience to the law of his God "manifest in the flesh."

One more case in this line. My friend, Prof. H. R. Barber of the Meadville, Pa., Theological School, informed me that Calvin Cutter, the very popular physiologist of years ago, permitted himself to go through a course of typhoid fever lasting five weeks,

without taking any food whatever. I was not informed that that experience incited any thinking through which conclusions might have been drawn, that would have induced others to trust nature, even as he had done.

In this last illness of the lady physician she managed her diet in her own way, and with a clear intellect she was able to know what she wanted; she always claimed that her food was taken with a relish, and always without trouble with the stomach, and with body so enfeebled that not the least exercise could be taken. The also enfeebled stomach, even though it were voiceless, was tasked with three or four feedings per day. But further along the digestive line were the recurring attacks of the chemistry of decomposition. Were these a tax on vital power? Did the insensible stomach ever have time to rest into power, between the meals, was there nutrition of the body by such feeding; was there support to vital power where digestion was so slow that the meals must have been received in layers?

It is possible that if the digestive conditions of disease had been duly apprehended, those rare, brilliant powers might have been preserved for years of enthusiastic work in the lines of her ambition and tastes? But medical literature had failed to incite thought, study, investigation; and her medical friend, with all the medical world against him, was unable to incite thought, study and investigation.

The sick must be fed to support vital power; and her life went out, possibly years before the physiological limit was reached. And yet that mind, while it did not trust nature, even as I dared not trust drugs and enforced feedings, was the first to suggest that

my therapeutical conceptions were worthy of the printed page.

I have chanced to hear two farewell addresses by patients of mine. One was by a woman of great intellectual gifts, who reached the dying hour after months of wasting away with consumption. There was an

address to the parents who were to become childless by her death, and to her son, her only child. Death was known to her to be very near, and yet she was able to talk with an easy flow of language, and with a clearness and directness of thought that was no less remarkable than thrilling. Was there a wasted brain in her case?

And I heard a father's parting words to his only son, who stood sorely in need of kindly admonition, and they were words of choicest wisdom marshaled in telling aptness. He, too, had become a skeleton. Was his a starved brain?

LECTURE VI.

HEREDITY CONSIDERED-MILK CONSIDERED AS A FOOD FOR THE SICK— SIR WM. ROBERTS QUOTED.

My Friends the Readers :

You have now become somewhat convinced that if the very sick have any power to digest food, it is very much less than you have always supposed; and have become wholly convinced I trust that the brain hasno need of stomach digestion to save it from waste or to conserve its functional powers, even when all else has yielded to the destructive forces of disease. You are now ready for a consideration of the third question naturally arising in this line of investigation.

Is feeding the sick a tax on vital power?

This question is so involved with the first and second, that it has already received an incidental consideration, and would seem to be in part answered; but the answer so involves the whole field of disease, and remedial therapeutics, that a library might be written upon it.

The physiological limit of a human life is determined in the germ period of existence to a moment; hence, "length of days” is a matter of heredity in this physiological sense. Did you ever stop to think of the possibilities of heredity? Let us see: go back eight generations and there are 256 persons to inherit from. What are the possibilities in the line of disease? of consumption, cancer, scrofula, lunacy, etc.? Our relatives, perhaps, not so very far back have died in hovels,

in palaces, in infirmaries, behind grated windows, of every kind of inherited and acquired disease-perhaps at one end of a rope--and they have been the contending forces on all battle-fields of history.

Mark Twain, our th cousin, roamed all over the old world with welling emotions, duly guarded for a gushing forth over the grave of Adam !

He who would boast of pure blood and a noble ancestry has pressing need to keep clearly within the lines of credible history or tradition.

The capital stock of a human life, therefore, is its hereditary or constitutional power, and it can never be enlarged, and the vital question with every life is— shall living be confined to the interest, or shall the principal be cut down to meet the extravagances of the days, of the hours?

Every human life goes on serenely so long as the physiological balance between the constructive, and destructive forces of the body is maintained, by the digestion and assimilation of food. The first step, then, in every disease, is the first loss of this balance by whatever lowers digestive power.

Behind every attack of pneumonia, of rheumatism, behind all fevers, and all malignant diseases that sweep whole families away is heredity, and a taxing from food decomposition, of unknown time, of unknown gravity. It is the "fittest" that survive, and because of hereditary power of self-protection.

To get down to closer work, you must first clearly understand that the digestion of a meal in the most perfect health is such a tax on vital power as to decidedly enervate both mental and physical energy during the active period of this process. What must it be then when this digestive power is weak through he