per annum.

The sponge as an animal possesses many advantages over his more
aristocratic neighbor, man. He breathes but he has no lungs, and
therefore cannot have pneumonia. He digests his food, but he has no
stomach, and therefore never has dyspepsia, gastritis, or any of the
many ailments that belong to that much abused organ. He has no
intestines, and therefore cannot have appendicitis or Asiatic cholera or
any of the long train of diseases incident to those complicated organs.
He has no nervous system--oh, happy sponge!--therefore he cannot have
nervous prostration, hysteria, or epilepsy. He has no use for doctors,
and therefore has no unpleasant discussions with his neighbors about the
relative merits of the different schools of medicine. If he has any
predilections in the way of "pathies" we should say that he is a
hydropath. While he is a great drinker, he is not at all convivial--he
drinks only water, and takes that in solitary silence. He sows all his
wild oats when he is very young, while he has the freedom to roam at
will. He soon tires of this, however, for he selects the rock that is to
be the foundation of his future home and there settles down for life,
"wrapt in the solitude of his own originality." He is not troubled with
wars or rumors of wars. His eyes are never startled or his nerves shaken
by the scare headlines of yellow journalism. The one sensation of his
life, if sensation he ever has, is when a great ugly creature of some
Oriental clime comes down to his home and tears him away from his native
rock, carries him to the surface, and there literally "squeezes the life
out of him." He finally dies of the "grip," and here he sinks to the
level of his more aristocratic neighbor.

But there is another side to our philosophy. If the sponge is exempt
from all these ills that we have enumerated it is because he is
incapable of suffering and is therefore incapable of enjoyment. Those
beings that have the ability to suffer most have also the ability to
enjoy most. The higher the type of civilization the greater
possibilities it offers for real enjoyment--also for real misery. This
being true, it should be the aim of highly civilized people to eliminate
as far as possible those things that make for misery, and cultivate
those things that make for happiness in the highest and best sense.

CHAPTER XXII.

WATER AND ICE.

We now have entered upon a subject that is of intense interest, studied
from