h lists came
and the world was wet with human tears and all the furies flew the
earth--grief, hatred, revenge, love, pity and remorse, but the wail of
mourning was throughout all lands in all the "sable panoply of woe"
attending fast lowering vitality, bred by force of pain and hope
deferred. Pliny well said: "Dolendi modus, non est timendi"--Pain has
its limits, _apprehension none_--and now as in his day, the latter bore
the palm.

Such was the position when two years ago the world first felt the impact
of the pestilence and millions withered up like blighted corn.

The Vagus nerve with which we have been dealing, is concerned with the
expression of emotions such as these; and being so, was burned up
rapidly with fervent heat--the flames of sorrow still with fasting fed.
In the majority of human lives such was the case, while the sources of
nutritive reserve force were depleted by lack of things of universal use
and foreign substitutes for normal food. Small wonder then the once
steady nerves soon buckled with the strain; that sickness followed
swiftly with disaster in its train and that the death rate rose
enormously, beyond recorded precedent. And then when seeming good
succeeds the storm of ills a plethora of new-born cares arose and worse,
more fatal still, reaction from the strain which with relaxing energy
demands its deadly share. Here in America we meet our troubles with
serener front, unawed by State-fed sacerdotal superstitions; but in
England how the scourge has wrung from dire depression its full toll of
death. There for the first time deaths exceed the births and for the
final quarter of 1918, the deaths exceed those of the former term by
127,000 of which Influenza claimed one hundred Thousand dead. Similar
conditions, it would appear, have been more or less general throughout
the European and indeed all other Continents and the title "Pandemic"
has been richly earned; but the term which would seem to me more
descriptive still would be _"Panasthenia"--the general loss of
vitality_.

The human organism is, as we know, electro-magnetic. The effect upon the
fabric of abnormal disturbance is registered with infinite exactitude by
electrons--atoms of electricity--which rise and fall in numerical
vibration according to the positive or negative tone of the whole; and
excessive manifestations in one direction or the other, indicate
respectively, a condition of positive or negative disease.

When the slowly vi