In the abolition of poverty by mechanical appliance, in the provision of ethical and moral satisfactions for the human spirit which desires richer gifts than material supremacy, this empirical method would seem hitherto to have failed. They would appear, however, to be on surer ground who prophesy its success in the war against disease. Here at least discovery can have none but beneficial results; and the competition is one of absolute human advantage. Yet the progress of the modern campaign against diseases, distinguished as it has been by triumphs which appear almost miraculous, still suffers resistance which baffle and frustrate its purpose. There appears a kind of unseen antagonist, who will rally in one region forces which have been beaten elsewhere, and is determined never to allow mankind the full fruits of victory. That all diseases will be slain by science, and all slain speedily, was one of the accepted anticipations of the earlier nineteenth century. In the great outburst of a triumphant optimism which inspired the Early Victorian literature, the present, whose discontents were clearly diagnosed, was sharply contrasted with a future where such discontents would be no more. Here, on the solid ground, a new race should arise, whose life, if limited, should be at least secure. On one side, it may be confessed, there are evidences of an almost exultant advance. The surest ground for optimism, for faith in the “beneficent processes of the unseen time,” is provided by examination of how many human scourges have been rendered innocuous within living memory. We have eliminated from Europe the menace of those sweeping cyclones of pestilence, whose terrors brood like a grey cloud over all the brightness of the Middle Ages. One-third of Christendom perished in the few months’ agony of the Black Death. The sound of its lamentation, the madness caused by its apparently irresistible destruction, still remains revealed in those “Dances of Death” which absorbed the later medieval time, and in the literature of protest and despair of a similar age. The Plague still ravages the East, but science has succeeded, and apparently will succeed, in protecting Europe against it. Other malignant fevers we seem on a fair road to stamp out altogether. Smallpox has almost disappeared, under the combined effects of sanitation and vaccination. Diphtheria has lost its terrors since the arrival of the antitoxin treatment. Hydrophobia has become merely a dread memory of the past. Even tuberculosis, the special and terrible scourge of the northern races, is likely to become in the future but as an evil memory of old years. Science again, through the devotion and intelligence of a long roll of volunteers, has boldly sallied out from the limited abodes of men into the wild and shaggy regions of Nature, in the determination to strike its enemy boldly at the centre of its empire. It is not content with mere preventives and prophylactics, dosing men with drugs or covering