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Typos p. 22: idiosyncracies [= idiosyncrasies]; 28, n. 2: Human Heridity [= Human Heredity]; p. 43: descibe [= describe]; p. 44: moreoever [= moreover]; p. 44: charaters [= characters]; p. 45: pshycho-physical [= psycho-physical]
Chapter I The Conditions Essential to Health
I shall now deal with these in the order given. This, unfortunately, is a condition of health over which, as individuals, we can have no control. For a good initial endowment depends upon being descended from sound parents, 1 and no man has ever been able to choose his parents or any individual in his ancestry. 1 An unsuspected and yet essential condition of this soundness will be dealt with in due course. Societies have existed in the past in which such rough measures as would help to promote this end were regularly enforced, and there still exist certain primitive communities where a similar practice may be observed. 1 But most Western people, who have suffered from the spread and paramountcy of Socratic doctrine, have abandoned this wise policy, with the result that not only do we of Western civilization share with the rest of humanity the fatal disadvantage of being unable to choose sound parents (a fact which cannot be helped), but our parents themselves do not necessarily consider, nor are they taught, that they have any pressing duty to select each other for soundness (a fact which can be helped). Nor is there any authority in the land to compel them to do so. On the contrary, in so far as authority in Church and State deals with the matter at all, it condones and actually encourages careless, random and dysgenic mating. We have seen that, even if we cannot select our own ancestry, it does not follow that our ancestry may not be selected for us, at least from the standpoint of psycho-physical health, provided that machinery be established to this end. But in order to establish such machinery, the nation itself, i.e., the people behind the Government of the land, must first abandon the Socratic values. They must learn to disbelieve in the principle that "love" can justify any match, no matter how 1 See, for instance. Dr. B. L. F. Laubscher's description of the pagan natives of the South Eastern Cape Bantu (Sex, Custom and Psycho-Pathology. London. 1937). In short, the people who desire that a good initial endowment should be the possession of all and sundry must, in the first place, recover the biological attitude towards mankind which existed in pre-Socratic times. 1 It is not claimed here, and never has been claimed by anyone who is well-informed about the factors involved in heredity, that it is possible exactly to predetermine the perfection of an individual or a generation. And those who try to cast ridicule upon eugenics by calling attention to the manifold slips 'twixt the cup and the lip which may occur even after the most carefully arranged matings, are merely trying to score a temporary advantage over a public which, on matters of breeding and health, is still lamentably ill-informed. What is claimed, however, and with special emphasis, is that much can be done at least to favour the nearest possible approach to perfection in the individual and in a generation, and that at the present time nothing is being done in this direction, but that, on the contrary, all the influences which do operate in this matter are of a kind calculated to bring about the worst instead of the best possible result. Since disease, debility and psycho-physical defect, far from adding to the pleasures of life, merely aggravate its manifold difficulties, it should be no hardship to be compelled to seek a healthy mate. For although in these days of average sub-parity it may be easier and more expeditious to select a morbid or debilitated specimen, and although among the morbid or debili- 1 For a detailed argument with documentation showing the connexion between the doctrine of Socrates and the post-Socratic values which spread throughout Europe, destroying the biological attitude towards Man, see the author's Choice of a Mate. Before discussing an unsuspected yet essential condition of sound original endowment it may be well to discuss two less obscure aspects of it which are likely to be overlooked. The first is the inadequacy of the recent official Health Campaign launched at great expense by the Government and sponsored by the Church; and the second is the tendency, very prevalent to-day, to confound the consequences of a supposed bad initial endowment with the consequences of a faulty life-routine. (1) The Inadequacy of the Present Official National Health Campaign. It must be plain to the meanest intelligence that the provision of swimming-baths and playing fields in no matter what profusion and at no matter what expense, and the wide extension of so-called "Physical Training", must remain inadequate measures for promoting health and the breeding of sound stocks, provided that nothing is done to guarantee to posterity the precious possession of a good initial endowment. So long as the masses of the nation are allowed to believe that love based on non-biological values justifies any match, no matter how thoroughly unwise from the standpoint of health; 1 1 In order to show that this belief is no fiction of the author's own imagination, let the reader's attention be called to only one flagrant instance of it, which was recently reported in the Press. At Salford Police Court in the second week of January, 1938, Mrs. Annie Hoey of Sandford Street, Salford, applied for an affiliation order against John R. Piper, an inmate of Henshaw's Institute for the Blind, Manchester, who was said to be "of low intelligence, practically blind, stone deaf, and almost dumb," In his cross-examination of the plaintiff. Piper's If a National Health Campaign really meant business it would need to institute far more drastic and fundamental measures; but, by so doing, it would inevitably clash with any number of vested interests, and its days would probably be short. In view of the extent of degeneracy to-day, and in view above all of the injury being done to the physique of the nation by a routine of life hardly any aspect of which can be approved, the measures adopted by the promoters of the National Health Campaign are ludicrous in their inadequacy, and reveal a degree of official contempt of public intelligence which is all the more staggering for being so nearly justified. As regards that part of the task alone which consists in securing a sound initial endowment to posterity, it is no good saying, as many do to-day, that the neces- counsel said: "Don't you a normal woman feel ashamed of yourself when you say you considered marrying a man so incapacitated?" Mrs. Hoey replied: "No. Why should I feel ashamed? We liked each other." And, it must be admitted there is nothing in modern English values that could have made the woman feel ashamed. The fact that they "liked each other" was sufficient Justification for a foul match. (2) The Tendency to Confound the Consequences of a Supposed Bad Initial Endowment with the Consequences of a Faulty Life Routine. There can be no doubt that, at present, much too much easy and thoughtless fatalism prevails in this matter. People are too prone to ascribe wholly to their constitutions faults which are often partly due to a vicious or ignorant life-routine, and the world in general is taken in because it is insufficiently aware of how often a fairly good initial endowment becomes impaired as the result of protracted wrong living, not necessarily associated with vice or debauchery. Conversely, fairly sound health (for there is probably no really sound health left among the random-bred stocks of civilized people) due to a good regimen and a good use of self is too often ascribed mistakenly by sickly onlookers to an exceptionally good initial endowment. They behold a display of life-mastery and, instead of wishing to learn something from it, indolently shirk any investigation about it, by declaring it to be due to an exceptionally fortunate initial endowment. As an interesting example of this, I hope I may without immodesty point to a personal experience. My wife and I lived for sixteen years in the same district of London, where we were well known, by sight 1 For a preliminary sketch along scientific lines of what might even now be done in the formulation of general rules for human mating, see the author's Choice of a Mate. This book is a pioneer effort and doubtless contains much that time will make it necessary to modify. But it will help the reader to appreciate the enormous amount of knowledge that has already accumulated on this subject. And yet, in all this time, not one of our friends and acquaintances in the district, not one of the shopkeepers in the district, and, last but not least, not one of the medical men in the district (one or two of whom we knew) ever asked us how, in the midst of a civilization which is supposed to give rise automatically to a whole catalogue of minor and major ailments, we managed to achieve this feat of relative good health. I have now reached the point when all that remains to be said about a good initial endowment relates to that unsuspected and yet essential aspect of it which was discussed, probably for the first time in history, in the pages of my Choice of a Mate, and even there received, in my opinion, less attention than it deserved. By way of a preface to my remarks upon it, however, I should point out that, in view of the failure to take account of this aspect a failure characterizing all the books written hitherto about health and how to attain it it is here claimed that none of these books, not even the best of them, achieves its alleged purpose. I shall elaborate this contention with a conspicuous example later, but will now confine myself to describing this unsuspected aspect of a good initial endowment and the relation it bears to perfect health. Owing to the enormous and quite disproportionate To such lengths have these oversights gone, in spite of all the so-called "spiritual" conquests of Man, that truths readily acknowledged in the breeding, health and satisfactory nurture of animals, are hardly ever applied, except grudgingly and belatedly, to Man, and then only under the direct pressure from isolated individuals, or at most minorities, who often earn unpopularity by their attitude. The fight Mr. F. M. Alexander had, for instance, before he was able to persuade a mere handful of medical men in the Western world that the mechanics of the human body in activity, and their proper conscious management by the individual, are an essential factor of perfect health, is but one instance among many of the depths to which we have sunk in our insistence on regarding Man as something outside and certainly above the concerns of the animal world. 1 And, to the average reader, it may seem odd that, by this very insistence on our "superiority", we should have sunk lower than the beasts in precisely those aspects which, through our romantic conceit, we have consistently neglected. Now there is one feature about the human body and its normal functioning which has been completely overlooked and, therefore, wholly neglected throughout historical times; and as even to discuss it will, owing to its fundamental novelty, strike most people as strange 1 Mr. Alexander's teaching will be dealt with in a special chapter later in the book. It may be as well to start by directing attention to a few facts familiar to every engineer concerned with steam locomotion. It is known, for instance, that a locomotive engine is designed and built with all parts as accurately as possible proportioned and balanced for the performance expected of it. A locomotive, built to draw a coal train of 800 to 900 tons at from 10 to 22 miles an hour, will differ from that built to draw a passenger train of 300 tons at an average speed of 55 miles an hour between stopping places. Similarly, a passenger train locomotive for suburban service with frequent stops will diner from either of the former locomotives. These three engines, A. B. and C., will differ in boiler capacity, cylinders, fire-box, steam-pressure per square inch, weight, and what is known as "adhesion". They will display many other differences, but enough has been said for the reader to grasp that, not only must the various parts of each locomotive be carefully adapted to its expected performance, but also that it would be ridiculous to expect of each type the performance originally allotted to it, if random interchanges were made between the respective parts of A. B. and C. Now it is not my intention, in applying these examples to the human body, to dwell on the obvious inferences. I shall not discuss the optimal lung capacity, heart dimensions, abdominal viscera, and muscles, for a man or woman of any given stature if health and efficiency are to be maintained; for this aspect has already been dealt with by others. The fact that there must be such an optimal relation between stature and the organs of the body hardly requires stating, nor does it seem All this, however, has been gone into by others who have attempted to set a standard. 1 Incidentally, the causes adduced for the high percentage of people who fail to attain the standard have, in books dealing with this subject, shown insufficient insight. But the attempt has been made, and I am not concerned with it beyond recording the fact. What I am about to infer from the steam-locomotive examples above is, as I have claimed from the start, something new and, therefore, not nearly as obvious as the inferences just described. I claim that it is an essential consideration in the discussion of that important contribution to health which is initial endowment, and its omission in toto, from all books on the subject of health and its attainment, hitherto published, entirely invalidates the implied submission of their authors that they have compiled a complete catalogue of requirements. In order to forestall adverse criticism, I wish, however, to add that it is the inferences I draw, and the place given to these inferences in a book on health, which constitute the novelty of my contribution, rather than the facts from which these inferences are drawn; for some of the relevant facts were known to medicine long before the twentieth century. Dr. Talbot was writing about one or two of them half a century ago, whilst Herbert Spencer, ninety years ago, shrewdly foresaw the position I am now adopting. Returning then to the steam-locomotives A. B. and C, and supposing them capable of breeding, so that male locomotive A. could reproduce its kind with female locomotive A, it may be assumed, from what we know about heredity, that they would breed true, i.e., since no genes of any other class of locomotive 1 See, for instance. The Assessment of Physical Fitness by Professor G. Dreyer and G. Fulford Hanson. (London, 1920). But, if we further suppose that the males and females of A. B. and C. locomotive types are not only all capable of reproducing their kind, but also capable of being fertile in the process of cross-breeding male A. with female B. or C., and female A. with male B. or C. we could not, on the basis of our knowledge of the laws governing inheritance, expect the whole of the broods of locomotives thus reproduced to be true to types A. B. and C. Some would be necessarily mixtures, and even those which happened not to be mixed would, in their germ plasm, contain elements alien to their type. Thus we should have cylinders, boilers, driving-wheels, etc. all disproportioned, and the inter related parts would no longer have that optimal balance essential for the harmonious and efficient performance of the tasks originally expected of A. B. and C. respectively. If we could speak of health in relation to the steam-locomotive, we should say that the members of these mixed breeds, owing to the disproportion of their vital parts, would no longer function healthily. It is a mere platitude to state that the human body consists of definite organs, nor is it unreasonable to claim, on the data we now possess, that there must be for every variety of stature and type, as also for each sex belonging thereto, an optimal arrangement and proportion of these organs if functioning is to be harmonious and healthy i.e., if perfect health is to be maintained when once the suitable conditions of diet, hygiene and bodily co ordination in activity, are established. Even as regards the endocrine glands, it is easy to see how a marked disproportion would, owing to a defective or excessive secretion, initiate disturbances In a natural state, we are justified in assuming that, wherever mixed and disharmonious creatures came into being as the outcome of parental disparity, they were quickly eliminated as the result of their lowered viability. Under the stress of rigorous conditions, allowing of no aberrations from a certain standard of efficiency, we should therefore expect that among all segregated groups of men a standardized type must in the course of time have been produced which was viable for their environment and the tasks it imposed. And in this standardized type we should expect to find a certain optimal proportion of bodily parts without which the requisite performance demanded by the environment and its tasks could not be achieved. A margin of faint variation might occur, but it could never with impunity exceed the point where viability, which here implies complete efficiency, was impaired. If, however, even at this late hour in our history, when primitive peoples still untouched by Western culture are ever more difficult to find, we are nevertheless able to classify certain types that have become distinctive and standardized through segregation, have we not the natural demonstration that, where segregation has been possible, there has indeed also been this tendency to standardization of bodily structure? If the reader turns to any illustrated treatise on ethnology, he will immediately see what I mean. Between the various individuals of distinct and, until recently, segregated tribes, peoples, or races, he will note a striking resemblance not merely that which the uncultivated eye sees in any group of strange people, but a resemblance which can be registered almost as if such people were casts from the same mould. It is a quality which stands in marked contrast to the infinite diversity of facial and bodily features, On leaving such a crowd in one of our cities, to confront a group of people hailing from a segregated and standardized community, we get the same impression as we might on leaving a poultry yard containing Light Sussex or Rhode Island Red fowls, to enter one where the birds are random-bred from every variety of domestic fowl. The latter, revealing all possible permutations and combinations of their mixed ancestral strains, may present a picture of individual uniqueness, but the experienced poultry keeper does not need to have studied the relevant textbooks to know that health and stamina, not to mention laying capacity, are noticeably lower in these random-bred than in standardized stocks. It would seem, therefore, that in a state of nature, where rigorous elimination of individuals beneath an optimal standard proceeds automatically from one generation to another, there tends to arise under segregation the formation of a type which, while it is standardized to survive in a certain set of environmental conditions and, therefore, to perform adequately the tasks these impose, also, as a by-product, so to speak, stamp a uniform pattern on the physiognomies and general anatomical parts of the people concerned, so that, the chance of disparate parents being steadily reduced, a harmonious and well balanced constitution tends to become widespread. The optimal relation between organs and stature, stature and limbs, etc., is established. Thus Such standardized people can become disharmonious and disproportionate, unbalanced and, therefore, functionally faulty as the result of disharmony, if they mix with others differently constituted, and become what is known as a miscegenated stock. From the dire results of such a departure from custom, it might be thought that an instinctive prudence had been gradually reared in animals and standardized men, preventing them from consorting and especially from breeding with strange stocks or strange strains of the same stock. And, indeed, if under the guidance of a biologist like Charles Darwin, we turn to the zoological aspect of this question, we find ample justification for this conjecture. There does indeed appear to be an instinct, even in different strains of the same species of animals, to segregate and thus to preserve whatever standardization their strain may have achieved. Darwin tells us, for instance, that "the alco dog of Mexico dislikes dogs of other breeds, and the hairless dog of Paraguay mixes less readily with the European races than the latter do with each other. . . . In Paraguay the horses have much freedom and . . . the native horses of the same colour and size prefer associating with each other, and . . . the horses imported from Entra Rios and Banda Oriental into Paraguay likewise prefer associating together. In Circassia . . . horses of three sub-races whilst living a free life almost always refuse to mingle and cross, and will even attack one another. "In a district stocked with heavy Lincolnshire and Light Norfolk sheep, both kinds, though bred together, when turned out, in a short space of time separate to a sheep . . . the two kinds keep themselves as distinct as Darwin adduces numerous similar facts relating to geese, monkeys and other animals. As regards Man, the same instinct to segregate and to avoid the connubium of other strains is found among so many distinct types, when once the process of differentiation from other types is established, that it would cover several of these pages to name all the known instances. If, however, the reader will turn to pages 5456 and 7291 of my Choice of a Mate, he will find the relevant facts. To refer briefly only to England here may seem trifling, but for the benefit of the English speaking reader it may be of interest to state that there seems little doubt that the English were once, and for a long period of their history, probably standardized. For, apart from other evidence we have of this, 2 we also know that, incredible as it may now seem to modern people, the English were once upon a time a good-looking nation. 3 And this fact alone argues an established harmony of features 1 The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. London, 1885. II. pp. 8081. 2 See my Defence of Conservatism, Ch. V. and The Choice of a Mate, pp. 118122. 3 Dr. Emma Gurney Salter, Litt. D. in Tudor England Through Venetian Glasses (London, 1930), quotes various testimonies from the reports of Venetian ambassadors to this effect. See especially pp. 117, 121, 123. There is also similar testimony from a German traveller named Keichel. See also Thomas Hardy in The Return of the Native, Chapter I. Book III. According to Froude, Erasmus also bears witness to the same effect. And this is probably true of all the distinct stocks who were the remote ancestors of the present European peoples. For, besides other evidence available, there is a fact connected with them the significance of which, for the claim I now advance, appears to have been seen by only one investigator. It is known that many of these ancient forebears of modern Europeans, including the Anglo-Saxon, used measures derived from various parts of the human body measures which have come down to their descendants, still bearing the anatomical names they were first given. Now, this could hardly have occurred had the people devising such measures not been more or less standardized. And this is, indeed, the conclusion reached by Professor William Ridgeway. For, on this very subject, he observes that, "Among primitive and practically unmixed races, where all live under the same conditions, idiosyncracies of stature are rare, and consequently the average-sized foot will give a standard sufficiently accurate for all their purposes. When, however, people of different stocks come into contact, and different modes of life may cause differences in stature amongst the various classes of a single community, many variation of the foot or cubit will naturally be found." 1 This is not only tantamount to acknowledging the operation of the process of standardization, in making uniform the physiques of segregated primitive peoples, but it also confirms all I allege regarding the converse process that of the mixture of different types. For although Professor Ridgeway does not appear to have been aware of the fact that where such mixture has l A Companion to Latin Studies (Cambridge, 1910, Chapter VI, II.) See also Professor W. Ridgeway's article in A Companion to Greek Studies (Chapter VI. 8.) where he ascribes the differences between the Attic, Olympic and Aegenetic foot standards to the differences in stature between the people from whom they were derived. In practice, therefore, the policy of aloofness in Man and animals of established distinctness, means progressively increasing standardization and, therefore, ever more perfect somatological and psychological balance, harmony and health. But, it may be asked, why should this process be necessary to perfect health when once other essential conditions thereto, such as the optimal hygiene, diet and bodily co-ordination in activity, are already established in the group? Here we come to the crux of the whole matter, and it is this essential part of a sound initial endowment which has hitherto been overlooked, not merely by orthodox medicine and genetics, but a fortiori by all writers on the subject of health up to the present day. Unfortunately for modern civilized man, there is in the mechanisms governing heredity throughout animal life, including humanity, the factor known as independent inheritance. This means that from parents and parental stocks which are disparate in constitution stature, general proportion, 1 hairiness, pigmentation, type, nerve and mental equipment, stock traditions, muscular potentialities, etc., the offspring are not harmoniously blended composites of both parents, but inherit bodily parts from either parent, or parental stock quite independently. They may, for instance, receive certain parts of their nose from their mother's side, and other parts from 1 A normal difference of stature and proportions between male and female must not be confused with the conspicuous differences often noticed between parents in random-bred stocks. See on this point my Choice of a Mate, pp. 426427, etc. In other words, breeding from disparate parents and parental stocks is tantamount to producing a machine, such as a steam-locomotive, from spare parts obtained, not merely from different makers of locomotives, but from different types of steam-locomotives procured at random from different locomotive builders. Confusion, therefore, is inevitable, with all that it may mean in the form of disharmony and consequently dysfunction. We can, therefore, take it for granted that the inheritance of bodily parts and characters is such that harmony and balance do not necessarily occur in offspring unless the separate sources from which they derive are more or less uniform. Thus Lundborg asserts that "in the crossing of races, it is not the whole combination of characters (genotype) whether of the father or mother, that is inherited, but rather that every character, more or less, is inherited independently." 3 Small comfort can be gathered by modern Europeans, including, of course, English people, from the fact that Lundborg speaks of "races" in this passage; 1 Lundborg found four different parts of the nose (at least) which may be inherited independently. Die Rassenmischung Beim Menschen. (Jena. 1913. p. 90). 2 Hence the prevalence of ugliness or, at least, of plainness, in modern people; and in this respect it is interesting to note that Dr. G. Draper noticed the surprisingly low standard of beauty in the average hospital ward. (Disease and the Man, London. 1930. p. 59). 3 Op. cit. p. 36. As anyone can see for himself, who travels in a train, 'bus or liner where European or English couples are gathered in large numbers, the crossing that occurs to-day is chiefly of disparate types and statures, dark and tall with fair and short, and vice-versâ, aquiline schizothymes with snub-nosed cyclothymes, powerfully built types with mates of slender build. But, when it is remembered that every character, more or less, may be inherited independently from either parent by the children of these random-mated people, and that harmony and, consequently, uneventful and smooth functioning may therefore be impossible in their case; when it is remembered, moreover, that these same random-mated people were themselves the offspring of random-mated parents, probably as disparate as they are, can anyone wonder that, first, there is so much ugliness and asymmetry in civilized crowds and, secondly, so much illness of a vague and ill-defined, or of a pronounced or acute kind? "The fact that there are inherent differences in the size of organs and parts is of profound significance," says Dr. Crew, "when it is remembered that it involves the inevitable sequel that racial and other crossings can lead to serious disharmony." 1 Over eighty years ago Herbert Spencer wrote: "The offspring of two organisms not identical in constitution, is a heterogeneous mixture of the two, and not a homogeneous mean between them." 2 And, on these grounds, in 1892 he strongly advised the Japanese authorities a relatively standardized people not to allow intermarriage between their own and other nationals. 3 1 Organic Inheritance in Man, London, 1927. p. 125. The italics are mine, A.M.L. 2 Principles of Biology, pp. 397398. 3 See a letter written by Herbert Spencer to Kintaro Kaneko on p. 322 of D. Duncan's Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1906). Although he did not possess all the facts now accumulating on disharmony resulting from the independent inheritance of bodily parts from disparate parents, Spencer, with his customary vision, saw what Dr. Crew maintains concerning this phenomenon. 1 For he said: "An unmixed constitution is one in which all the organs are exactly fitted to each other and are perfectly balanced. . . . A mixed constitution, being made up of organs belonging to two separate sets, cannot have them in exact fitness cannot have them perfectly balanced; and a system in comparatively unstable equilibrium results." 2 One of the first facts which called my attention to the phenomenon was what Ruggles Gates noticed in the crossing of races " the fitting of large teeth into small jaws, or serious malocclusion of the upper and lower jaw." 3 As I had observed these disharmonies among English people whose parents had not crossed with another race, I concluded that such defects were not restricted to race-crossings, but could and did occur when different types of a random-bred nation united and procreated. Indeed, I went further, and argued along a priori lines that, if such disharmonies were possible in teeth and jaws, and upper and lower jaws, why should they not extend all through the skeleton and the organs it supports? I then started investigating the matter and was not 1 See quotation p. 25 supra. 2 Principles of Biology, pp. 297298. 3 Heredity in Man. (London, 1929) p. 329. 1. Stature and internal organs. For instance, tall men may have inherited their size from their taller parent, or his remote stock, and their internal organs, or some of them, from their shorter parent. 1 2. The length of the upper half of the body may be inherited independently of the length of the lower half. Thus "a child may happen to inherit all the relatively long or short segment lengths of its two parents, and may thus be taller or shorter than either parent." 2 In other words, if my father has relatively long legs and a short trunk, and is thus medium-sized, and my mother has short legs and a long trunk, I may inherit each of these four characters independently. I may get my father's long legs and my mother's long trunk, and be taller than either parent, or I may inherit my father's short trunk and my mother's short legs, and be shorter than either of them. Or I may be medium sized like each of them. Meanwhile, as my various organs and parts of my face have also been inherited independently, I may be a complete confusion of disparate parts. 3. Legs and arms may be inherited independently. 3 Thus I may get arms short or long in proportion to my legs or vice-versâ. But, if this happened to a quadruped it might incapacitate it for life! 4. I may inherit my heart and circulatory system from my shorter parent and my large stature from my taller parent. 4 In this case my circulatory system may be inadequate, and I shall always overstrain if doing work expected of a man of my stature. Nor is this the 1 Ruggles Gates Op. cit. p. 329. According to this author, Davenport also shares this view. 2 Ruggles Gates, Heredity and Eugenics. (London, 1923) p. 29. 3 Dr. Rodenwaldt. Die Mestizen Auf Kisar. (Jena. 1928). p. 334. 4 Ruggles Gates, Heredity in Man. p. 329. 5. The ball of my femur may be disproportionate to the socket in the pelvis and I may thus suffer from congenital dislocation of the hip, if I inherit my femur from a small and gracile parent and my pelvis from a large and heavily built one. 1 6. I may, if my parents and their stock are disparate in constitution and size, inherit a colon so large in proportion to my size that, all my life, I may have symptoms, acute, sub-acute, or merely disturbing, of the disorder known as Hirschprung's disease, in which large accumulations of fæces occur in the large gut. 2 7. According to Mjoen, even diabetes may be due to the fact that the pancreas of the individual has been inherited from his smaller parental stock. 3 And so on, almost ad infinitum! We are thus compelled to regard this phenomenon of independent inheritance of bodily parts from disparate parents as running throughout the various glands, organs, bones and nervous equipment of the body and producing every kind of disorder, from the most insignificant, and therefore only faintly disturbing, to the gravest and therefore disabling affection. It is no exaggeration to claim, indeed, as I have done above, that breeding from disparate parents who are dissimilar in constitution (over and above their sexual differences, of course!) is like building steam-locomotives, or any other machine, from spare parts derived at random from different makes and patterns of these machines. And it may be inferred from what biologists of the standing of Dr. Crew assure us, and from evidence now to hand, that the resulting disharmonies are not merely of the face and limbs but also of all the organs including the endocrine glands. 1 See Bryn's evidence for this in Human Heredity (p. 295) by Drs. Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz. (London, 1931). 2 Human Heridity. p. 377. 3 Volk und Rasse. 2nd Art. p. 74. Above all, how is it possible that those who are aware of the facts I have just advanced can still pursue the policy of assuring such generations of people that, if only they see that their food is wisely grown and wisely selected, all will be well? One has but to gaze on the motley crowd of a modern city, composed of groups from all classes, rich and poor alike, with their infinite variety of types, sizes, shapes, looks and skeletal weight, a sight by-the-bye which seems to offend nobody! in order to be convinced that causes of poor health and stamina are operating among them, more obscure, more serious and more invisible than merely unwise feeding and the unwise growing of food, and bad hygiene. Even among the youngest and freshest of them, there can be seen, by one who holds high standards, that settled condition of psycho-physical distress, faint or pronounced, which is hardly banished in their moments 1 It is also important to bear in mind that, on the principle of reversion through random breeding, the wanton crossing and recrossing of different types and stocks, which goes on to-day, must (if Darwin's findings in the case of random breeding in animals are valid) be causing degeneration. To refer to only one instance of this, the reader may be reminded of the relatively high incidence of plural births in recent times. We are told by the Press that this is perplexing doctors. Why? As long ago as 1898 Dr. Talbot adduced significant facts to indicate that there was probably a connexion between plural births, in humans, and degeneracy. (Degeneracy, its Causes, Signs and Results. London, 1898, pp. 284285.) Besides, a moment's reflection should suffice to convince any one that the probability does lie in the direction shown by Dr. Talbot. Among them, here and there, there may be one who, by a fluke, i.e., by a quite exceptional feat of jugglery on the part of the hereditary factors, has acquired a constitution sufficiently balanced to work with a certain amount of harmony. He and she look, and are, more serene; understand the functional irregularities and distresses of relatives, friends and acquaintances as little as they do their own superior plight in this respect, and boast of never feeling out of sorts and of never having "to take anything". Such lucky members of the motley crowd, in no way necessarily differentiated from the rest in hygiene or diet, may however be easily discerned, and often the conspicuous symmetry of their features (conspicuous because rare!) adding to their claim on the observer's attention, may be but an outward sign of their haphazard inner harmony. It is well to bear in mind that, as things are, such people nowadays are as they are as the outcome of pure chance, by the fortuitous concatenation of genetic circumstances which, as a general rule, produce only the unbalanced, asymmetrical, ill-constituted and atypical creatures adults and children which compose even the most respectable and respected groups of modern civilized communities. The great majority, each of whose odd and unique features proclaims the probably odd and unique When, therefore, it is remembered that, in addition to being unstandardized themselves and deriving from unstandardized stock (both of which conditions, as we see, involve defects of their own), they also probably inherit either the predisposition to certain diseases, or are actually tainted with diseases known to be hereditary, 1 it seems rather like mockery to try to persuade such people that simply by observing rules of diet and wiser methods of food preparation and food production, they can ever hope to enjoy "perfect" health. Not that I underrate the immense importance of these factors; for was I not, with my Man's Descent from the Gods, 2 one of the earliest among lay writers to emphasise the essential nature of certain modern dietetic discoveries in relation to health and its conservation? But I have never underrated the indispensability of a sound initial endowment if wise dieting and wise hygiene are to play their expected part, and it will be remembered that in my short monograph on F. M. Alexander's work 3 I placed a sound initial endowment first among the prerequisites of a healthy life. I readily and cheerfully concede to F. M. Alexander that a substantial amount of the latter-day mal aise, debility and general subnormality to which I have alluded, is due to the faulty bodily co-ordination in activity of probably 999,990 in every million of modern English people. But this does not affect my claim that the lack of balance and of harmony in their oddly acquired anatomy must play an important part in the etiology of their usually deplorable condition and that, 1 For an incomplete but fairly comprehensive list of these, see pp. 203206 of my Choice of a Mate. 2 Published by Heinemann in 1921. 3 See Health and Education Through Self-Mastery. Nor should it be forgotten that the so-called "bodily" conflicts and disharmonies, which modern people owe to their random-breeding, are but tangible counterparts of their so-called "mental" unbalance. This, unfortunately, can hardly help being so; for, by crossing and re-crossing different strains indiscriminately, we make as great a jumble of psychological traits and tendencies as we do of anatomical parts. Mental habits, tastes, and tempers, differ according to the set of cerebral and other nervous centres they are associated with, and if we indiscriminately mix these nervous centres we can expect only confusion. 1 At best such random-bred people are unsettled, unstable, incapable of firm resolves or of enduring volitional efforts and quick decisions. They easily suffer from conflicting motivations, irreconcilable passions, mutually antagonistic tastes, so-called "bad tempers", and other consequences of a confused psychological equipment. At worst they are pronounced neurotics or even psychotics. Lundborg was convinced that random-breeding produces changes in the constitution as the result of a disequilibrium of the nervous system and the endocrine balance, 2 Of random-bred people he says: "No definite line points the way for them, they waver between disconnected and hereditary tendencies." 3 Of the same kind of people, Davenport says: "they will tend throughout their lives to be restless, dissatisfied, ineffective," and he ascribes much of modern crime and insanity to the inheritance of badly adjusted mental and temperamental differences. 4 1 I pointed this out thirty years ago in my Defence of Aristocracy (see Ch. VII), but it was elaborated in my Choice of a Mate. 2 Hereditas, Vol. II. 1921. Rassenmischung, p. 79. 3 Die Rassenmischung Beim Menschen. p. 163. 4 Heredity and Eugenics, p. 236. I shall now examine, in the light of the above discussion, one of the better books on health and its attainment published hitherto, and show how, even in 1 On the contrary! They are told by their popular and unscientific writers that the best comes from mixture. Even Bernard Shaw does not scruple to use the authority he has gained through material success the only success that impresses modern people in order to declare quite unsoundly that "the future is to the mongrels!" (See Daily Mail, Sept. 30th, 1943). It is Dr. G. T. Wrench's The Wheel of Health. 1 It just happened to appear at a time when a certain growing body of English social reformers, who might be described as "Healthy-Soil Healthy-Food Evangelists," were beginning to make themselves heard; and as behind them was gathering an ever increasing body of romantic urbanites who are easily fascinated by a policy, of "back to the land", without necessarily possessing any precise knowledge of rural and agricultural conditions, it made a wide appeal. It gave a sick generation a definite specific, which promised to work wonders, and it claimed that perfect health was not unattainable if man only set about securing it along dietetic lines. Briefly, the book recommended the imitation of a certain people the Hunza especially in the matter of the care they bestow on the soil from which their food is produced. "Get the soil, from which you produce your food, whether animal or vegetable, into a healthy condition by returning to it all that you take from it (hence the revolving "Wheel of Health"), and you will be a people enjoying perfect health and physique like the Hunza." Such is its message and its specific. The Hunza are described by Dr. Wrench (who, by-the-bye, is a medical man of some distinction) as possessing "perfect physique and health." He shows them to be wonderful agriculturists, and ascribes their "perfect health" to this fact. Apparently their foods 1 Published in London, 1938. Indeed, Dr. Wrench is not content with this guarded statement, for elsewhere he says: "The whole, meaning of these people . . . is none less than that the perfect physique and health, which we have grown accustomed to regard as the privilege of the wild, and, with rare exceptions, beyond the attainment of civilized man, is not unattainable. It is attainable, if we give the same devoted service to our soil, its health and the health of its production, as for centuries this remarkable people have given to theirs." Nothing, in fact, could be plainer! The previous more guarded statement is superseded, and we have the promise of perfect physique and health if we do as the Hunza do in matters of soil and food. Dr. Wrench, however, to make his case complete, argues from the opposite angle that the poor health of the westerner, his bad physique, even his mal-co-ordination and the blemishes in his figure, are due to the inferiority of his food and the methods of its production. To this end he quotes Professor Martin Sihle of Riga who, enumerating the average modern westerner's defects, mentions his flat, frequently concave chest, protruding stomach, 1 especially below the navel, his humped drooping back and crooked misplaced neck and head, his falling away shoulders and salient shoulder blades, his knock-kneed legs etc. He also refers to the frequency of short-sightedness, deafness partial or complete, chronic colds, and difficulties of nose-breathing through polypus and swelling. He calls attention to the prevalence of dysfunction of the internal organs, as for instance the apices of the lungs. People, he says, are anæmic because they are 1 I presume the translator of this passage, whoever he may be, meant "belly". He emphasises the rarity of good digestion, good bowel function, and abdominal tone, and mentions piles, distended belly, congestion of the portal vein and liver, and visceroptosis as customary. Finally, he discusses the nervous disorders, hysterias, neuroses, insomnia, migraine, neuralgia, low spirits, depression etc. of civilized man, and sums up the whole as a "deplorable picture." Dr. Wrench agrees that it is a deplorable picture. What does he ascribe it to? Just as he ascribed the perfect health and physique of the Hunza to their food and the way they ate it and grew it, so, approaching the question from the angle of disease and defect, he ascribes the deplorable condition of civilized men also to their food and the way they eat it and grow it. He says: "It [the description given above by Professor Sihle] is but the final picture of the impoverishment of our soils, an impoverishment forced upon us because we did not possess the almost unimaginable foresight that was needed to feed. the rapidly growing urban populations of the industrial era." Thus, the perfect health of the Hunza is due to their food and their care of the soil on which it is produced, and the ill-health, defectiveness and postural vices of civilized man are due to his food and the impoverishment of the soil on which he grows it. Now, there is a quality pleasingly simple about this message, and as nothing is better appreciated in these days of bewildering complications than the simple specific, a doctrine of health reducible to a "devoted service to the soil, its health and the health of its production," naturally makes a wide and prompt appeal. It wounds nobody's susceptibilities, except perhaps those of our anonymous ancestors who had not the Before testing Dr. Wrench's solution, to ascertain its precise value as a complete programme for perfect health and physique, let me again emphasize the fact that, not only do I firmly believe in sound food soundly grown on healthy soil as an essential contributory factor in securing perfect health, but have for the last sixteen years, in a world not organised for the production of sound food, and having no traditions in the matter, also been endeavouring to maintain myself on a sound diet that prescribed by Dr. Bircher Benner 1 which I believe to be as nearly healthy as it can be under modern conditions. Having recorded this fact, and thereby implicitly declared my whole-hearted support of any movement to regenerate the soils from which our food derives, I hope I shall not be misunderstood and shall be listened to patiently when I now proceed to a brief criticism of Dr. Wrench's thesis. I do not quarrel with his prescription, but with his claim that it is sufficient as a means of removing the ills and defects of western civilized man. He presents it as a whole doctrine of perfect health and physique and scornfully speaks of the work of the scientific dietist as "fragmentation". While holding no brief for the scientific dietist, I reply that Dr. Wrench's panacea is itself only a further example of the "fragmentation" against which he inveighs. It is perhaps not incomprehensible that a medical man, when once he has turned his back on orthodoxy, not to mention the "bacteriological bias", as I termed it sixteen years ago, 2 should plunge with fanatical conviction only into another form of the fragmentation 1 Who long ago complained of the sinister influence on health of food grown on unhealthy soils. 2 See my Man, an Indictment, published in 1927. Now I submit that, in his enthusiasm as a convert, he has overlooked, not only essential links in his argument, but also not a few reforms, if the perfect health he pictures is to be secured by western man. Like most of his fellow authors of health books based on food reform, he gives neither new comers to the problem, nor his eager and often romantic followers, the full doctrine of health which he claims to have given them. In order to prove that it is their food and the way in which they produce it, which differentiates, both in health and physique, the Hunza from western civilized peoples, he should first have carefully examined and eliminated all other possible sources of difference between the two peoples, and thus have left the road clear for ascribing to the factors of food and soil alone the "supreme excellence" of the Hunza physique and health. Unfortunately he does not do this. The consequence is, as a medical man said to me recently: "There is no satisfactory reason for believing that the Hunza owed their fine health and physique to their food and good soil at all." If we consider a few important factors, other than 1 The review was, as a matter of fact, too kind. I intended it to be kind, because in spite of all its faults I wished the book to be read by the subscribers to The New Pioneer. I believed in its message. I only cavilled at the claims being too sweeping. I did, in fact say, "Dr. Wrench has shot beyond, and perhaps misleadingly beyond, his goal," and I proceeded to state very briefly some of the things he had not considered. But I did this only at the end, as a sort of afterthought, and in a few words, although I did contrive, notwithstanding, to call attention to everything I now propose to discuss at greater length. 1. One of the first characteristics of western civilized man which would strike say, the ancient Spartan or the Bushmen of South Africa, if they were in a position to watch what now occurs from generation to generation in a country like England, is that there is no elimination of the tainted, the ill-constituted, the ill-shaped, nor even of Nature's failures. All are allowed to breed and reproduce their kind, no matter how ill-begotten they may be. Thus poor strains, weedy strains, ill-constituted strains, tainted, dwarfed and asthenic strains, are allowed to swell the population with people who cannot be, and are not, as vigorous, viable and efficient as the better constituted. Even serious defectives like those stricken with hereditary blindness (retinitis pigmentosa, for instance!), deaf-mutism and mental deficiency are allowed to marry and reproduce their kind. As Sir Walter Langdon-Brown said so well last year: "Unfortunately there is reason to suspect that the genetic material in a civilized society deteriorates slowly, but almost certainly, for harmful mutations are preserved which would perish under cruder conditions. True, they are compensated for, but that is not cure, and their persistence must be injurious to the common stock." 1 Dr. Wrench goes to some pains to show that "the effects of faulty feeding are not permanent in the race. They are not stamped into the race ineradicably by heredity." This may readily be conceded. But what about Nature's own freaks which occur everywhere? They may even occur among the Hunza, for he tells us that some babies are born who cannot be breast-fed. The question is whether, apart from the effects of faulty feeding, there are not, as Sir Walter Langdon- 1 Some Aspects of Social Biology. Opening Address to the British Social Hygiene Council's Summer School. August, 1943, reported in Nature. October 23rd. 1943. They may be called "Nature's failures." And here in Europe, as in America, they are not eliminated and the stock deterioration they cause is, therefore, cumulative. Can this be expected to produce flourishing health in a population, even if optimal conditions of diet and soil are present? What would a stock-breeder say if, urged by ignoramuses in such matters, to allow his poorer specimens, his failures, his tainted beasts, to become the dams and sires of his future herds, not merely once in a while, but continuously? Now, we are not told by Dr. Wrench whether the Hunza eliminate those of their kind who are examples of harmful mutations. He does not tell us whether they do away with their less successful specimens. But if their science of artificial aids, their charitable institutions and their occupations are not able, as ours are, to make life possible for their inferior biological specimens, we must assume that their crude conditions of life eliminate such people. For the standard of performance demanded by the environment would be unattainable by them. In this way a general high level of health would not be reduced among the Hunza by an annual influx of creatures of lower or impaired vitality, and this would amount to a substantial factor in their attainment of the perfect health Dr. Wrench assumes. The only fact Dr. Wrench tells us, which bears on this matter, relates to the Hunza's custom of allowing those infants to die who cannot be breast fed. This, however, is a significant pointer. It indicates 1 In the case of the female with android or funnel-shaped pelvis, for instance, our civilization, of course, provides artificial aids in the form of expert obstetric operations and instrumental interferences, if childbirth is otherwise impossible. Likewise, in our civilization, mothers unable, through lack of vigorous mammary function, to suckle their offspring, are provided with artificial foods. Thus, in the absence of any information from Dr. Wrench on this matter, we may assume that neither the Hunza's science of artificial aids, nor their protective charity, nor their daily occupations and environment, generally, are able to secure survival for what, to use Sir W. Langdon-Brown's terms, we might call the victims of "harmful mutations." But, if this is so, we are at once in possession of a major contribution to the health and physique of these people which is of the utmost importance, and Dr. Wrench's conclusion should read, not that "the supreme excellence of the Hunza's physique and health is due to their food and their care of the soil from which it derives," but that "it is due to the latter plus a constant elimination of all poorly or ill-constituted and defective individuals." 2. Another major source of disease and of certain physical defects in civilized men, as F. M. Alexander has abundantly proved, is their habitual and almost universal faulty co-ordination in activity i.e., their loss of the correct controls for bodily adjustment, when they are either at work or at play, when they are seated, standing, walking or running. This faulty co-ordination and absence of correct control leads to every possible kind of violence against the normal balance, stance and compensating strains of the bodily mechanisms and, when protracted (as it always is unless corrected by the acquisition of the art of Conscious Control) to cover the whole of a man's or woman's life, lead to any number of bodily defects which make function difficult if not faulty. Thus, when this protracted misuse of the bodily mechanisms occurs, we always see in modern civilized adults, not only most of those defects which Dr. Wrench's Professor Sihle of Riga enumerates so well, Indeed, it was whilst first reading Professor Sihle's list of modern man's bodily defects in The Wheel of Health flat, frequently concave chest, protruding stomach, especially below the navel, humped drooping back, bent in upper portion, crooked misplaced neck and head, falling away shoulders, with salient shoulder blades . . . weakness of breathing . . . defective functioning of the heart . . . visceroptosis, etc., I say, it was when reading this depressing list, followed by Dr. Wrench's sweeping declaration that it is all due to "the impoverishment of our soils," that I first began to suspect the author of The Wheel of Health of an enthusiasm for his new creed which had blinded him even to the demands of logic, and made his reiterated charge of "fragmentation" against his fellow-scientists sound rather curious. For he takes no steps to relate visceroptosis (sunken stomach organs 1) or salient shoulder blades, or misplaced neck and head with the impoverishment of our soils. Besides, had I not seen, not once, but again and again, those very same defects corrected and eliminated by F. M. Alexander, merely by the process of teaching those who displayed them the art of conscious control in the use of their bodily mechanisms? No modification either of their food or of the soil on which it was grown accompanied these corrections of bodily defects. Now, are we to assume that the Hunza escape these defects because they know how to use their bodily mechanisms correctly? Or are they instinctive and unconscious exponents of this correct bodily use? Dr. Wrench says nothing whatsoever about the right use of self in activity. He mentions F. M. Alexander more than once, but presumably only to forestall any reader who might wonder at his not being aware of one of the most genial discoverers of modern times. To anyone familiar with Alexander's technique and its 1 By which he probably means sunken abdominal or belly organs. So here again we are confronted by a major contribution to perfect health which is omitted from the prescription of The Wheel of Health, and to be more comprehensive, therefore, the conclusion should read, not that the "supreme excellence of the Hunza's physique and health is due to their care of the soil and the food it produces", but that "it is due to the latter plus a constant elimination of all poorly constituted and defective individuals, plus the employment of the correct control in the use of their bodily mechanisms". 3. Last, but not least, we come to the third major and equally indispensable contribution to perfect health and physique which, as we have seen, is the standardization of the stocks from which a people are bred. I need not again descibe this factor. It is dealt with fully above. It only remains to point out that, here again, Dr. Wrench's prescription is inadequate; for he neither refers to the question of stock standardization nor does he tell us anything about the health and physique of the Hunza in this connexion. We must assume its existence, however, or else disregard his claims regarding the perfect physique and health of the people in question. He says much that suggests the establishment of a At another place, moreoever, he speaks of this people of Hunza very much as if they were a type and, therefore, standardized; for he says it is "unique in its racial characters." If it is unique in its racial charaters, every Hunza must be differentiated in a marked manner from other nationals, and since this could hardly be so if each Hunza is also differentiated from every other Hunza, we must conclude that the Hunza folk do, in fact, constitute a type. Therefore, they are standardized, and derive a substantial modicum of their perfect health and physique from this condition. A further reason for supposing this to be so is the fact that they are a segregated people. Dr. Wrench tells us there has been some mixing, but he does not suggest that it has sufficed to modify them to such an extent as to make them cease from being "unique in their racial characters." In any case, we know that if severe segregation and endogamy, over long periods, follow slight mixtures, standardization may recover from the disturbance, especially if there is a constant elimination of non-viable or inferior specimens, and the mixture has occurred with a nearly similar people. Nowhere, however, does Dr. Wrench call the reader's attention to the fact that this standardization of the Hunza must play an important part in securing them their perfect physique and health and must, therefore, play a part of equal importance in securing the desirable physique and health of any people bent on emulating the Hunza's dietetic and agricultural traditions. So that, for the third time, we must amplify Dr. Wrench's conclusion, which must now read as follows: Not that "the Hunza's perfect physique and health These three essential additions to Dr. Wrench's prescription make good only its major omissions. But there are several minor ones of which my space allows only a bare mention. For instance, Dr. Wrench tells us hardly anything about the sexual life of the Hunza. Do they or do they not suffer from the neuroses and phobias commonly associated with the sex-repressions of our civilization? As pshycho-physical disorders of various degrees of gravity have been traced by reputable investigators to these sex-repressions, we must assume that the sexual life of the Hunza is free from them. But Dr. Wrench does not include this condition in his prescription. The Wheel of Health tells us nothing about the marriage age of Hunza females. Here again, it is certain that many of our childbirth difficulties and their regrettable sequelæ in mother and child are due to the absurdly late age at which the average English woman bears her first child (26 years). It must be assumed that the Hunza women marry and bear children during the optimal period for their race, whatever that may be. But there is not a word about this in Dr. Wrench's prescription. Even clothing, if injudiciously designed or imperfectly adapted to the requirements both of the climate and of each sex, may seriously impair both health and stamina. We must assume, therefore, that in Hunza the clothes for each sex are optimal for their climate and other conditions. But there is not a word of this in Dr. Wrench's prescription. Similar remarks apply to a number of other con- Although it has occupied much space, the examination of Dr. Wrench's book has thus proved well worth while. It has yielded three indispensable amendments to his prescription for the attainment of perfect physique and health; it has also called attention to the misleading generalizations characteristic of the health books based solely on diet and soil, and it has provided a useful means of applying to reality some of the claims advanced regarding what I term the "good initial endowment" factor in health. This, as the reader has observed, is the first of the four contributory factors making for perfect physique and health with which I head this chapter, and it was the first of those factors in my former work. Health and Education Through Self-Mastery, published in 1933. Summing up, therefore, it has been seen that this factor, "a good initial endowment," depends for the individual on his deriving from parents both of whom are healthy and free from all psycho-physical taints or blemishes, i.e., who have no personal defects likely to be inherited, and who derive from stocks similarly favoured. For, although they may be free from any blemish themselves, they may, if their stock reveals them, be liable to transmit them. Among possible defects, we need not, of course, consider injuries or maimings received during the lifetime of the parents, for, as acquired, these are, according to the general consensus of scientific opinion, not transmissible. Secondly, and this is quite as important as the first factor to be of perfect physique and health, a creature must hail from parents who are standardized, i.e., who, their sexual differences apart, reveal no marked disparities. This condition, of course, involves descent from standardized stocks, and no absence of disparities in the parents (just as no amount of apparent Given a sound initial endowment in this sense, healthy food grown on healthy soil is merely a means of continuing or prolonging an original desirable state, the means of carrying through life the supreme advantage of an originally sound heritage; and healthy food grown on healthy soil should not be exalted to any function higher than this. It is indispensable for the preservation of an original perfection, but it cannot produce perfection when the perfect original endowment is lacking. It is in this last sentence that the misleading character, not only of Dr. Wrench's prescription, but also of all similar prescriptions based on food and soil, is made completely clear. One last word! The reader may be thinking that Dr. Wrench and those whom I bracket with him as advocates of a healthy soil and the food grown thereon as a panacea for all ills, perhaps do not consider the question of standardization of human types as an essential condition of perfect health and physique because, in our western civilization, with its constantly moving populations, it would now be extremely difficult to set about achieving standardization in any nation or area. This may be true. I do not deny that at this hour in Europe and the Americas we are confronted with a state of affairs, tolerated without disquiet by both the mass of the peoples and their leaders, in which it would be most difficult to bring about the change both of heart and traditions which would enable standardized types to be bred in areas specially defined for this purpose. I would even go so far as to say that, as far as I can see, it will require generations of progressive enlightenment before this desirable policy can be adopted. Let healthy soil and the healthy food it produces be given us by all means! No one could desire this more than the present writer. But, if our social habits and traditional outlook make it impossible to standardize a type amongst us (to mention only perhaps the most difficult reform), let us at least give up misrepresenting the appalling mess we have made of our psycho-physical selves, as if it were merely the outcome of unhealthy food grown on impoverished and unhealthy soil. 1 As I have never seen the people in question, I am obliged to accept the view, echoed and re-echoed by all the Healthy-Soil-Healthy-Food Fraternity, that the Hunza are the exemplary creatures McCarrison and others have declared. But it would be just as well for the public to bear in mind that only a very few of those who have recently held this Indian tribe before us as an ideal have actually come face to face with them. |
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