But then thought turns to the other side of the picture, and is immediately faced with a challenge to its optimism. As soon as one disease is eliminated, another steps into its place to continue the old tragic function of scourging mankind with pity and terror. Science is always discovering new maladies, which baffle its exultant energies. Medical, as distinct from surgical effort, is still largely in the condition of alchemy: stretching blind hands in the darkness towards a secret not yet revealed. A great man of science recently asserted that there were only two medicines whose beneficial effect--in application to specific disorders--could be guaranteed--quinine and mercury; and that the operations of both of them were completely mysterious. We drain our cities, we use our knives and our medicines, we maintain armies of doctors, huge hospitals, and halls of research. And the result is that in the factory centres one-fifth of the children born perish within the year. Consumption, plague, malaria disappear. Their places are readily assumed by cancer, which is steadily increasing; by appendicitis, which had not even a name twenty years ago; by meningitis, which is excited by the ordinary harmless cold in the head. One woman in every twelve dies of cancer, and the cure still remains altogether unknown. The human body in increase of prevention, seems also to lose the power of resistance. Carefully shielded from the rough forces of the world, it falls a prey to injuries born out of the very conditions of safety which it has so laboriously constructed. “He who has ordained all things in measure, number, and weight,” said Mansel, “has also given to the reason of man, as to his life, its boundaries, which it cannot pass.” Some unknown Power seems with these “boundaries” still to defy man’s determination to push them back or fling them down. In ten thousand years mankind has not added a cubit to his stature. The Greek vision of bodily perfection has shown no advance in succeeding time. In the Middle Age, with its outward squalor and frequent pestilences--so operative in men’s minds that to some observers the whole appears as a kind of physical delirium--there are figures of Popes and Emperors taking the field at eighty years of age, and an ineffaceable impression of an enormous physical vitality. It would appear that, at least as far as one can look ahead, uncertainty, sorrow, pain, and longing are to be accepted as companions of the life of men. From these, indeed, have been born men’s highest achievements. Metchnikoff still proclaims unfaltering faith in the triumph of human intelligence, and sees a vision of humanity sustained on a diet of soured milk, to well beyond a normally secure centenarianism. The cry of such might still be the cry of Tithonus--“Release me, and restore me to the ground,” in a desire for the return to the fate of “happy men that have the power to die.” For, however successful we may find