of the day, but was eventually superseded
by the French expression "La Grippe," usually held to represent a more
modified form of the disease which appears to vary in intensity and
virulence according lo its provocation and derivation.

The old school hypothesis and the deductions therefrom would seem
therefore, to be this: That a super-malignant contagium imported from
some foreign source falls upon organisms predisposed to infection by
mental stress or physical privation and over-strain or both combined;
and the contagion thus generated through the medium of some unsuspected
"carrier" seizes upon and sweeps through that portion of the community
so predisposed, in the form of a great, general epidemic with a maximum
of mortality. At later intervals the same repeats itself with less violence
and reduced mortality, because a great proportion,--representing the
sufferers in the original epidemic,--being now thereby immune, the onus
falls upon that section of the younger generation unprotected by individual
resistant force who consequently become the chief sufferers--as in the case
of the present epidemic, the pandemic form of which is obviously due to the
fact that equal conditions of unrest, privation and distress prevail
universally throughout the entire nerve plains of the Planet.

The first recorded outbreak in America occurred in the year 1647,
followed by a second in 1655 and again in 1789 and 1807. In these the
mortality appears to have been confined, after the first outbreak, to a
few mere modest thousands whereas in the present visitation a
conservative estimate places the figures of the horrible world-holocaust
at no less a sum than 18 _million lives_ in all.[D] The ravages in
America have been appalling including many of the medical profession.

We pass on then to the second item--the question of the germ.

The illusive germ has come to be regarded by the layman with
reserve--nay more--with suspicion. The part of the bacteriologist has
been somewhat overdone. The conditions of popular credence are not what
they were. A great change has awakened the masses of the people and a
new intelligence is born which now discerns that disease is one great
Unity just as the body is one inseparable interdependent whole--that
_the cause of disease is in the blood_ and dependent upon its
nourishment and moreover, that the _physical forces of the body can be
exhausted as much by mental strain,--causing the too rapid burning