While deducing his argument from clergymen, Mr. Galton makes repeated and particular reference to the clerical _sub-genus_, missionaries, treating it as the more remarkable that these should not enjoy comparative immunity from disease, because, as he suggests, it would have been so easy for God to have made them a favoured class in respect of health: to wit, by the notable expedient of dissuading them from exposing themselves to any of the risks peculiarly attendant on missionary enterprise. 'Tropical fever, for example, is due to many subtle causes which are partly under man's control. A single hour's exposure to sun, or wet, or fatigue, or mental agitation will determine an attack.' What more simple than for God so to 'act on the minds of the missionaries as to disincline them to take those courses which might result in mischance, such as the forced march, the wetting, the abstinence from food, or the night exposure?' What more simple, either, it may be added, than for God to save prayerful soldiers from ever being killed in battle by merely putting it into their minds to desert whenever they are ordered upon active service? That 'the distribution of still-births is wholly unaffected by piety' Mr. Galton has satisfied himself by finding, 'on examination of a particular period, that the proportion of such births published in the 'Record' newspaper and in the 'Times' bore an identical relation to the total number of deaths.' He had previously, we must suppose, satisfied himself that advertisers in the 'Times' never say their prayers. For the asserted commonness of religious madness Mr. Galton cites no evidence whatever, and, to judge from the sympathies and antipathies of which one of his avowed opinions may be supposed to be the subject and the object, speaks probably on this point solely from hearsay. Very possibly, however, his assurance of the extraordinary prevalence of insanity among British noblemen may be based on personal observation, as, of course, is that regarding the prayerlessness of his own ducal acquaintances. Birds of a feather, proverbially, flock together, and the same touch of irreligion may quite possibly suffice to make certain dukes and certain commoners kin. Against the inefficiency, however notorious, of the clerical element in business committees, ought in fairness to be set the equally notorious efficiency of Jesuits in whatever they undertake, the signal statecraft displayed by the Wolseys, the Richelieus, and the Ximenes's of the days in which cardinals and archbishops were permitted to take a leading part in executive politics, and the very respectable figure still presented by the lords spiritual, beside the lords temporal of the British House of Peers. As for 'the common week-day opinion that praying people are not practical,' those by whom it is entertained, of course, mentally except praying Quakers.