I must say a few words at the outset on the terrible scourge of these islands, which most people call consumption, and the medical profession phthisis. The question “Is it hereditary?” stares us in the face at once whenever we think of it, and it is a somewhat difficult one to answer. I myself do not believe in heredity in the ordinary sense of the word as applied to disease. A beautiful young shoot of wood may spring from a fast-decaying tree, and if this be transplanted into good soil, it will grow as well as any other. What holds good as regards vegetable life cannot of course be shown to be quite true as regards animal, nevertheless there is a certain analogy. Consumption we believe to be infectious; if so, it is caused by a disease germ. Now your old-school hereditists would tell us that this germ descends from mother to child. In some cases it does or may, but the child very soon succumbs to _tabes mesenterica_, or some other terrible infantile disease. A germ will do one of two things: it will either assert itself very speedily, or be killed in the system. Nature sets about at once getting rid of these disease germs, supposing them to exist at the time of birth. She brings, among other organs of relief, the absorbents and glands into play; there is a struggle for life, in which nature often fails, because those very glands become overladen and diseased, tubercle being formed and multiplied within them. Nature does her best, but she is beaten—another proof of the struggle betwixt what we call evil and good, which is constantly going on in this world. Well, on the other hand, if the child is born of delicate parents, but free from germs, it has, if carefully fed, nursed, and tended, a very excellent chance of growing up well. It is difficult to conceive of a child having germs of, say, consumption in its system and these lying latent or dormant until she is a certain age, and then springing suddenly into life after she has suffered from some exposure and caught cold in the chest. There are easier theories than this by far and away to account for the children of consumptive parents dying of the same disease in their later teens. Besides, that word “latent” may be convenient, but it is a shockingly unmeaning one. I remember my father buying for a good round sum a few grains of wheat that were said to have been in the grasp of a mummy for a thousand years. The wheat when sown grew most certainly. It may never have been in the hands of a mummy at all, but it _may_ have been. If so, it was surrounded by dead matter, it was hermetically sealed against any influence that could cause it to germinate. Life was latent or asleep. But in the human body germs have no chance of dorminating, for so constant are the changes, that everything is constantly getting shifted, and by the time a man or woman is fifty he or she may have used up a score of bodies.