Heredity, health and personal beauty / by John V. Shoemaker.

Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Heredity, health and personal beauty / by John V. Shoemaker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    CHAPTER I. THE GENERAL LAWS OF HEALTH. IN entering upon the subject of health and personal beauty, which are correlated, it is best to consider, first, what is life, which includes them both. The obvious reason for this course is that if health and physical beauty depend on the observance of the laws of life, at least upon those of well-being, without which life would not be worth living, then we.can best under- stand the production and maintenance of these attributes through knowledge of their source. The most ordinary observer recognizes everywhere the difference between life, both animal and vegetal, and mere stocks and stones. He sees that the crucial test of life is ability or inability to produce after the manner of the kind,—animals, ani- mals ; vegetables, vegetables. He knows perfectly well that a block of red sandstone is derived from a stratum of the earth’s crust, but is not one of its descendants, while from the highest animal to the lowest they are respectively the progeny of similar beings. He sees this distinction as clearly as does the most profound man of science, with one exception. This exception is that he does not know, what is largely the revelation through the microscope, of the existence of a world which has alwa}^s been be}rond his ken, in which animal and vegetable forms so descend in the scale of life, or, more properly speaking, have not risen in it, that they are sometimes scarcely distinguishable, and sometimes not at all. In a word, barring this exception, the most ignorant of men sees as clearly as the most instructed the essential difference between the organic and the inorganic world. But that is only a small step, although, as being the first, an indispensable one to comprehension of life in its various