disease of language, his animal relatives who could not yet talk were not for that reason any more healthy; for all animal life is a disease as compared with plant life. The animal feels, perceives with his senses, and acts by impulse or instinct. To feel is to set up an activity within a self, and after a sort to make one's self ar object, or, so to speak, to exist for one's self. Hence to perceive other beings is to represent them by one's own activity, and thus to create within one's self a semblance of other realities. Perception thus rests upon creating within the perceiving being an appearance or semblance of a reality.

This is almost as bad a disease as language is, and we may see that the misfortune of language goes farther back and attaches to sense-perception itself; for the animal that feels or perceives makes for himself an image or representation, in fact, a seeming or makebelieve or some sort of untruth to stand for the reality.

The plant, it would seem, does not feel nor perceive nor move itself. It does not, like the animal, "dally with false surmise." It feeds on its environment, however. Its life is a life of assimilation and nutrition. The plant is engaged in seizing upon its environment and converting it into vegetable cells and adding them to its own structure. Here we have reached soundness and health at last, for we have realities at every step. We have the plant a reality, which acts upon inorganic substances in the soil and the air, and, gathering them to itself, makes them over into vegetable cells of its own kind or species. But after the plant has thus acted it has destroyed the individuality that previously existed in that part of its environment now appropriated for food. It has annulled other individuality to build up its own. What was real as carbon and oxygen and silica and soda no longer is real in that form. As real, they are united and converted into organic compounds that form the cells of the plant. As ideal, they may be still only carbon and oxygen and silica and soda. If the plant dies its vegetable cells will be captured by inorganic forces, and these elements (carbon, oxygen, silica and soda) will reappear in their old form.

Here we have to ask whether the plant life is not itself also a disease. Is it not a masquerade? Does it not act to enshroud the inorganic matter in new forms, making it as vegetable cells possess entirely new properties and lose its old properties? Does it not, after the death of the plant, let the old individuality of the elements reappear? But which is the true reality under the appearance is it the inorganic elements or the organic compounds?

Why should we not say, then, that the inorganic is a state of helpless abstraction, in which it does not realize its true being? And is it not the life of the plant that lifts up the inorganic into a higher and more concrete and perfect form of existence, wherein the inorganic elements reveal the wondrous possibilities that were in them, but not made manifest or brought into actual reality?

And again, if the inorganic is only itself a masquerade hiding its higher life until by the aid of the plant it comes to actualize or make real its true self, why shall we not say that the plant, also, takes on a higher form of realization when it, in turn, becomes feeling, perceiving and willing, on being taken up into the animal organism? For the representation of another existence than one's own is, after all, a higher form of reality for the being that it represents; for the inorganic does not fully realize itself until it comes in the plant and the animal to show what syntheses it is capable of, and in what ways it can be instrumental in the process of selfrepresentation. Self-representation in the form of feeling is, indeed, something that belongs to the order of the miraculous as looked at from the standpoint of the inorganic-it stubbornly resists a mechanical explanation.

But now, if we admit this new view of the subject, we must go farther and claim that man, by inventing language, creates a still more wonderful reality; for he produces a sort of counterpart to the general process that appears in chemism, in plant life, and in animal sensation. He gives an appropriate form to universals. Words make fast the fleeting manifestation that goes on in the lower orders of being. Words as tools of thought make possible the grasp of a deeper reality in the universe, which the inorganic cannot compass, nor the plant, nor the mere animal; for thought can grasp the process in which the individuality of the lower order of beings is immersed. Thought can perceive particular things in their causes, and it can think a unity of all causes in a final cause. We have to return to our first statement of the statement of the philologists, and, entering our protest, say, therefore, that religion is not a disease of language, nor a disease of any kind. But religion is an insight into the final and deepest order of being-the truth which is under all seeming or imperfect being, whether inorganic or plant or animal or human.

Neither is thought to be called a disease of language because it deals with generalities. For the general process which is revealed in the changes that inorganic matter undergoes, and which take on new forms in plant and animal life, is first seized as the

deeper reality by philosophic thought, becomes possible through language. Thought reaches this deeper reality underlying all actualities, and it joins the voice of religion in saying that the deeper reality is a divine personal reason that reveals itself in the world; that absolute reason has a divine purpose, which is the creation of personal beings-training them to individuality in the cradle of time and space.

In the light of this divine purpose all imperfect realizations, such as the inorganic, may be seen to be more or less appearances, having each some fragmentary or imperfect form of being that does not fully and adequately explain itself, although each step above the inorganic is a nearer approach to the absolute reality. Reversing the biologic standpoint, those lower forms of existence may be called diseased. Plants, just because they do not possess feeling and sensation, may be said to be diseased. Then, too, the animal, who is less deeply diseased because he possesses sensation and locomotion, as well as nutrition-the animal is diseased because he does not possess language. He cannot reach religion or thought.

But man is more healthy and less diseased than any other being on earth, because he can form some adequate idea of the divine purpose of the world, and by that reach ultimate ideals through which to guide his lite. By his thought he can see what the fullness of reality means.

According to biology as it is, many, or, indeed, all, of the higher facts and activities of man may be regarded as diseases of vital functions. But, on the same ground, life itself may be regarded as a disease forced on the inorganic.

This use of the analogy, however, which makes life itself a disease, leads us to suspect the truth of the biologic view of religion and philosophy, and suggests to us the necessity of turning round the measuring process. We must interpret the lower from the standpoint of the higher. The lower is the incomplete and imperfect being. The higher is the more realized being, the more. perfect, and it explains to us the existence of the lower by showing its purpose.

The analogy of the lower order of being does not suffice to explain the higher orders of being. The scale must be inverted before the human can be understood.-"Journal of Education,"

March 13, 1902.

COSMOPOLITAN HEALTH STUDIES.*

By F. L. OSWALD, M.D.,

Author of "Physical Education," "The Remedies of Nature," Etc.

VIII.-ITALY.

Italy, the lost Eden of the Mediterranean, is a country of curious contrasts, a land of abject pauperism and super-refined luxury, of contented ignorance and restlessly inquisitive science, and of sanitary customs, varying from indolent tolerance to the most vigorous enforcement of red-tape regulations.

The quarantine of the northern seaports is the strictest in Europe. Neglect of any one of the endless formalities can forfeit the clearance papers of a vessel otherwise as inauspicious as a newbuilt and clean-looking pleasure yacht.

The very fishing-smacks are overhauled every time they enter and leave port, and some of the sanitary by-laws are vexatious enough to defeat their own purpose. Picking up a shipwrecked crew at sea subjects the rescuers to the trouble of a return-trip to the next quarantine port, with the risk of protracted detention. As a natural consequence, signals of distress are apt to be ignored if there is any chance of shifting the burden of the responsibility on the next comer, a big passenger steamer, perhaps, with experts able to bring the red-tape bullies to terms.

But the hygienic departments of the interior carry the Let Alone principle to equally remarkable extremes. In Naples there are beggar-alleys practically exempt from the visits of healthinspectors, and unmolested by tax-collectors as long as the guild (corporation, trade union) of mendicants furnishes a few weekly volunteers to the street-sweeping department. Like slandermongers, these delegates clean other people's sidewalks, but not their own. While they are about it, they prospect the neighborhood for convenient night-quarters, and when summer heat makes their dens untenable, are permitted to sleep under the porticos of public buildings or in the vestibules of chapels and charitable establishments.

Their children haunt the Basso Porte (pronounced Basho Purt', in the local patois), running races along the wharves in the costume of the Nereids, or paddling about in quest of garbage. Bal

*Continued from page 314.

anced on the center of their home-made rafts rises a tub, perforated like the battery turret of a monitor. Dipper after dipper full of edible miscellanies is thus transferred from the scum of the harbor-waters to a receptacle gauged for four or five gallons, and incidentally answering the purpose of a sieve.

Decadent apples, stale cabbage-leaves, imperfectly scraped tincans, egg-shells with a residuum of bottom facts, even potato peels and macaroni of a flavor not improved by an infusion of bilgewater: the witchcraft of domestic chemistry will metamorphose them into a fairly palatable and not wholly indigestible stew. The juvenile forager also keeps an eye on floating bits of fuel, and concludes his day's work at 2 p. m., with the proud consciousness of having kept the family-pot boiling. His younger brothers, in the meanwhile, have been exploiting the green-market for offal. And the paterfamilias? Gambling, probably, or begging. Or peddling a portion of his boy's collection for pig-feed, to raise the price of a lottery ticket. The police do not care. On the contrary, the ticket sales in the Ghetto are encouraged by the custom of admitting a Capo Lazarone-a Boss Loafer, we might translate him, to watch the drawings, and enhance the guarantee of fair play.

Still, the enormous traffic of the big city, almost precludes the risk of actual famine, and the ne plus ultras of South European misery have to be studied in the poor inland villages of Campania and Sicily. In regions, once favored by a perhaps unrivaled combination of fruitfulness and climatic amenities, beings of our species are now kept alive only by "refuse and the dread of death," as the Abbé Galiani expressed it. Dusty, dilapidated hamlets, nestling in some dell of the treeless hills; dust-storms, sandstorms, droughts, tinging everything in the same dreary gray; skeletonized paupers hoeing away, half hopelessly, in a sun-blistered potato field, blear-eyed children grubbing about dump-piles and defending their pre-emption rights against the encroachments of mangy curs.

No drinking-water in sight, but a well-worn trail to the bottom of the ravine, suggesting the existence of a spring or walled pool -probably the latter, forest destruction having parched out the running waters of the uplands, centuries ago. An enormous area of southern Italy is now almost as treeless as northern Africa. Droughts can be only partially counteracted by irrigation, and ophthalmia is ominously prevalent.

The coast-dwellers are somewhat better off. The Mediter