much harm is done, but when the social glass means alcoholic liquors then the harm begins. It must be admitted, however, that the patient with the tobacco heart almost certainly smokes a good deal more than would come under the name of a social pipe. And the patient with alcoholic neuritis or cirrhotic liver almost certainly drinks whiskey oftener than is required by sociability. Nevertheless, it is the first step that counts, and the habit is formed and the taste acquired as a part of our modern sociability. The man who neither smokes nor drinks is likely to be looked upon as unsociable and must have some other good qualities that may balance the want of these social habits, otherwise he runs the risk of losing caste.

A certain young man was appointed assistant and successor to a elergyman in the north of Scotland. On arriving at his destination, the elder gentleman welcomed the younger and courteously offered his snuff-box, which was declined. A little later, at the dinner table, the young man was cordially asked to help himself to a glass of whiskey, and again he declined, saying he had never tasted it. After dinner, in the study, he was offered the friendly pipe, and this was declined. "He had never learned to smoke." This was more than the old gentleman could stand and after a moment's thought he asked, "Do you ever eat grass?" Astonished at the strangeness of the question, the young man admitted that he had never acquired the habit. "Then ye had better gang awa back south, for ye are company for neither man nor beast."

Sociability thus leads one on, and from smoking and drinking sociably

one easily acquires the habit that leads to chronic gastric catarrh, cirrhosis of the liver, arteriosclerosis, alcoholic neuritis, chronic nephritis, gout and insanity. The list would, indeed be a long one if followed out.

"See Social life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmogrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:

O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;

Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!

"Freedom and whiskey gang togither, Tak aff your dram."-Burns.

It is the unthinking license, the freedom, the excess that brings on pathologic conditions.

But there is more than one kind of danger in the cup.

A New York physician reports a series of cases of chancre of the mouth. It seems that some men working on the ash dumps were in the habit of rushing the growler, which in this case was any old can picked out of the ash heaps. This old can, with its ragged edges, thus passed around several times a day, served to carry more than the social beer, and sores on the mouth appeared in several of the men. Now this is undoubtedly an extreme case of disease following sociability, yet it is a typical case where contagion is spread by means of a sociable custom.

Young women living in the cities in tenement houses, and working all day in factories, spend many of their evenings in the dance halls of the city seeking recreation and sociability. A number of ladies of a philanthropic turn of mind have investigated these dance halls and found that many of them have direct or indirect connection with saloons. These ladies advise that all dance halls be licensed

and that none be allowed to have connection with a saloon, and to-day they report, with some pride, that there are two dance halls in New York quite safe. As to the conditions in the

other nine hundred and ninety-eight, we need not inquire too closely. Among another class of ladies, enamored of the social life, the desire to bear children, which should be a spontaneous and natural desire, is overcome and overmastered by the desire to continue in society. And, if by accident a child is born, the young mother in society prefers Mellin's or Eskay's food or Horlick's malted milk to the natural mode of feeding infants, and thereby lays the foundation for future pathologic conditions in her offspring. She forgets that it may be her prerogative and good fortune to be the mother of a future president or of a future wife of an American ambassador to the court of St. James.

That is one of the points where, it seems to me, sociability has a direct influence on pathologic states.

Also, where sociability produces slavish aptitudes and tendencies to individuality, of self reliance and free shrink from responsibility, a lack of thought and independence, there sociability is directly the cause of psychopathologic conditions.

Some one may ask now, in the words of Sir Toby Belch: "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no shall be no more cakes and ale?" Clown: "Yes by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot in the mouth." By no means; rather let us hope that by moderation to-day we may be here to enjoy the cakes and ale at some future time; but to attain that, we must exercise moderation; moderation in eating and drinking, moderation in smoking, moderation in the number of banquets we attend each season, moderation in all things.

The nature of genius affords, seemingly, a theme for never-ending discussion. Those afflicted (?) by it are alleged by some of its analyzers to present not only abnormal psychology, but abnormal physique as well. The work of Lombroso for a time led us to associate these elements in unwarranted degree. The body of the genius had a conformation that was a reflex and an index of his mental tendencies. Alexander Pope, with his diseased and deformd body, stood as the type of the unhealthy genius. Of course we have increased our knowledge on these points and decreased, if we have not gotten rid of, our prejudices.

Quite the most virulent attack that we have encountered of late upon the genius and all of his tribe is that made by Robert Jones, lecturer at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. The genius is not only inferior mentally and physically to ordinary men and women, but he is actually unfit. Nature, he declares, hates genius. When she would eliminate a type from the human family she endows it with genius. Its source is the neurotic temperament, which Dr. Jones appears to hate quite cordially. People with neurotic temperaments, he says, are inferior, and he seems to have but few exceptions in his mind.

While Jones is careful to state that by "unfit" he means unfit from the biological and evolutionary standpoint, he nevertheless is at pains to prove that geniuses are unfit as well from the ordinary standpoints. Indeed he proves

too much. His indictment of the neurotics is not tempered by even a hint that they are ever lovable. Logically, his neurotics ought in some way to expedite nature's alleged efforts to eliminate them, they are so disagreeable. They are capricious, fickle, explosive and unreliable. No one can predict what they will do next. They cannot be depended upon for kindness, devotion or love even to their own relations and dependents. Their natures know no standard of consideration and they are wanting or lacking in mental pose. They are hysterical, eccentric, peculiar, cranky. They suffer from somnambulism, irritability, from obsessions or nervous exhaustion and from epilepsy. They are abnormally susceptible to impressions, suffer from functional neuroses of various kinds, have neuralgias and headaches, are dyspeptic owing to delicate digestions or premature decay of the teeth, suffer from neurasthenias, are unduly sensitive to alcoholic stimulants, and may even be moral degenerates. They are subject to insanity, suicidal and anti-social tendencies, and bodily abnormalities, such as night-blindness, Huntington's chorea, muscular dystrophies, hemophilia and diabetes.

It is this class, says Jones, that provides the geniuses. There are all degrees of genius, of course. Some of these people are clever, brilliant, even extremely capable and of high intellectual ability. But as a class they are inferior, hence unfit from the ordinary standpoint, as we said before. The thoro-going genius is one of this class

raised to the nth power. This would of course imply a very great deterioration. Upon close examination, says Jones, we find that the "dazzling gift" of the genius consists merely of some aptitude trifling in itself, yet so unusual as to place its possessor in a selected and numerically small class.

Is not all this very simple? What were Milton and Carlyle driving at when they characterized genius as "the inspired gift of God?" By what nonsense was Schopenhauer obsessed. when he admiringly characterized the genius as "a man who knows without learning, and teaches the world what he has never learned." Because one who can produce what none else can, has genius, as Lavater said, must we stupidly worship him and his power any longer? The Iliad is the product of psychopathology and we should view it as we do a lily on a dunghill. Probably Homer had a deformed spine and was capricious," as well as blind. The veracity of the biographers who describe Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer and scientist, as a man of fascinating personality, splendid physique and all round ability is open to question. How could these things be, if the highest type of genius is an unbalanced, defective wreck? What a disagreeable person Shakespeare must have been. And we And we may be sure that he was at the very least an epileptic. As to his personal charm, we must disregard the testimony of contemporaries, for the few flimsy data that we have concerning him are certainly involved in uncertainty and historical doubt. Aubrey had someone else in mind when he described Shakespeare as "a well-shap't man.' We can only picture him as an irascible, unsocial and deformed creature. We We know there is considerable doubt as to the genuineness of the Stratford bust.

The true genius is apt to be predisposed to states of extreme irritability and often suffers from intense emotional disturbances resulting in severe nerve storms or outbursts of motor violence which can only be described as that of subacute mania. The rapidity of his mental processes and the intensity of his conative tendencies when

aroused know no control and such are

often out of all proportion to the stimulus. stimulus. We are quoting Jones.

Jones cites Cowper, Shelley, Charles and Mary Lamb, Coleridge, Burns, Pope and Byron as types of the neurotic temperament in its worst form, as he views the subject. We are asked to believe that these men were inferior to their commonplace fellows. Their psychoses and neuroses stamp them as possessors of too finely organized nervous systems, which Jones tells us are the signs and symbols of inferiority. Unable to adapt themselves to their environment and unqualified to withstand the stresses and strains of life they stand convicted as unfit.

Is it the geniuses who are unfit, or should it be said that their environments are unfit for them? Which is the juster judgment? Is our social and economic system so well ordered that men of exceptionally high intelligence, possessing inborn creative ability and finely wrought brains, find themselves blessed, or is it so far out of gear that society loses much that genius might otherwise contribute uncursed by conditions that only the bovine-like nervous systems of commonplace people can withstand? Is it a wise judgment that proclaims the commonplace man's man's physical physical and mental status ideal and the genius anything but an asset? Is the thinker who suspects degeneracy where he encounters unusually high intelligence a hopeless intellectual Philistine or is he a

sound philosopher, just in his views and sound in his judgments?

Stevenson, the Beloved, asks us if it is best "to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity, swallowing the universe like a pill and traveling on thru the world like smiling images pushed from behind." We fancy that he had his own opinion of those who could so live. Let us thank God for the neurotics, even tho they have not the capacity successfully to run peanut stands, please everybody by the display of superficial graces, smother their creative impulses and devote themselves to the cultivation of poise and stability. Shall we enshrine the superman or the marionette?

Certainly the genius is abnormal in that he is not conformed to the ordinary rules or standards, but what the Jones school of critics calls the evidences of unfitness are merely preservative checks which balance the neurotic characteristics. Nature, far from aiming at his destruction, takes painstaking steps to preserve the genius. She is careless of the commonplace social unit, but she manifests the most solicitous care in respect to her superior charges. Man might take a valuable lesson from her. It is true that the progeny of genius does not inherit in a biological sense, and it is true that the genius does not tend to procreate in a sexual sense, but he is the schoolmaster of the race and the creator of a heritage that is of far greater significance than the sexual activities of ordinary men and women. They the geniuses are concerned with the racial, not the sexual, phases of human life and thought. That mind is narrow indeed that prates about the sexual disabilities of genius, fails to realize the relative insignifi

cance of this sexual phase of the subject, and cannot see the large racial bearings of genius itself. As to the genius being anti-social, that idea is based upon the disinclination of genius to waste time with commonplace bores. Recall here that amusing satire of Horace in which he describes his sufferings from the loquacity of an impertinent fellow. Horace's churlishness -a preservative check-offended the tiresome people who annoyed him, but his rebuffs of bores have profited us vastly.

William Dean Howells once delivered himself of the following opinion, which, if true, ought to settle all moot points regarding genius. He said that "there is no genius; there is only the mastery that comes to natural aptitude from the hardest study of any art or science." Stedman, replying to this, dwelt upon the innate quality of the thing. It demands, he said, an admiration not excited by mere aptness strengthened thru patience and industry. "Like beauty, it is its own excuse for being." Plato tells us that "not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine." Recall Goethe taking up the study of versification in his old age. In Faust he gave us many original forms of verse, in ignorance of the rules of the schools. There are no laws by which we can write Iliads," says Ruskin.

Let us call things by their right names. Let us abjure euphemisms. Let our Halls of Fame have their titles erased and in their place substitute the legend: Temple of the Unfit. Let these monuments, dedicated to inferior members of the race, fittingly characterize Cæsar, Peter the Great, Michael Angelo, Bacon, Goethe, Tolstoy, Eschylus, Phidias, Dante, Cervantes, Rabelais, Newton, Hannibal, Keats, Burns, Byron, Shakespeare!