tioned, few are of more abiding interest than that which concerns itself again with Harvey’s realm and the finer processes of the circulation. How little we as yet know about these conditions, but surely distraught function is busy with them! Think what suggestions are contained in such an hypothesis as that of vascular spasm, or, to put it more generrally, of peripheral stasis! Long years ago our trusty and well-beloved Fellow, Sir Clifford Allbutt, now Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge, wrote a short paper on Mental Anxiety as a cause of Granular Kidney. It was to me one of those illuminating suggestions that have added an interest to my life. I believe it to be as abundantly true as I do that similar malign influences, by dislocation in some way, as I suppose, of our correlated impulses, make for cancer. You must have often seen the nervous, anxious, worried man, with the phenomena of high tension, and have felt able to predict, in posse, the future disease of this organ or of that. Such conditions, real diseases though they be, are but functional, but what a wealth of pathology is wrapped up in them!
Thus, as it is with life, so, in a measure, is it with its diseases. Life itself is a developing function; it comes to each one of us from the past, with innumerable atomic differences gathered by the way, and it passes on to each of our successors, similarly changing. So that Professor Arthur Keith, from another place, can say to us that a thousand years is as one day, so like is this to that; yet also one day is as a thousand years, and in that day so multitudinous and infinite have been the changes that life now is another life—the same, yet not the same.
This all too brief survey must suffice to show how
