He stopped smoking tobacco on the second day, and does not mean to resume its use. Of course he had no alcohol in any form during the fast, but he never has taken much alcohol, although he was not a pledged abstainer. The temperature was taken many times and seems to have been almost always subnormal, about 97 degrees Fahr., but this is not so unusual a condition as to call for comment. The chief cause of a subnormal temperature, in my opinion, is blocking of the body with too much food. No doubt in prolonged fasting the temperature may fall also; but sometimes a fast will be the cause of raising a subnormal bodily temperature, as happened in a case of mine in which on the twenty-eighth day of the fast there was a large elimination of urates by the kidneys and a rise of temperature from 96 degrees to 98.4 degrees. Subnormal bodily temperature has not received the attention which it deserves. It is usually one of the forerunners, or prodromata as they are called, of the onset of incurable diseases like cancer, Bright's disease or apoplexy. The commonly accepted view that the heat of the body depends upon the food, and that people eat blubber in the Arctic and Antarctic regions to keep the bodily heat up, is one of the chief causes for neglect of the study of subnormal temperature. And it is quite surprising that physiologists have not thought it necessary to explain why nature has provided sugar and palm oil and cocoa-nut oil and ground-nut oil in the tropical regions, as well as abundance of olive oil in the warm temperate regions of the earth if these foods keep the bodily heat up. They ought to have been more abundantly supplied in the Arctic and Antarctic regions if the accepted view is correct. Besides, if we must eat blubber to keep bodily heat up in the Arctic regions when the outside temperature is 50 or 100 or more degrees lower than that of the body, what ought we to eat in the tropics to keep bodily heat down when the outside temperature is 50 or even 80 degrees above that of the body? Physiologists have not explained this, although assuredly an explanation is wanted. But the true explanation, the correct explanation, would have demolished the doctrine that bodily heat is due to the food, and so it has not been given. It is too simple to imagine that the bodily heat is, like the body itself and all its functions, the effect of the life-force that inhabits the body and builds up the body so that the body shall be a fit dwelling-place for itself—this explanation is too simple and too idealistic for modern science, which is less and less disposed, we are told, to invoke the aid of a force of life to account for vital phenomena, although it assumes an attracting force to account for gravitating phenomena, and an electric and chemic force to account for electric and chemic phenomena. Modern science (and ancient science, too, apparently) which sees well enough that an idealistic or a materialistic explanation would equally account for the nexus of the phenomena of the universe, deliberately and almost invariably prefers the materialistic explanation. She is anxious that we should be kept free of superstition. But the superstition that forces are the effects of things does not seem to distress her at all. And so we are told that gravitation is a property of matter, and are forbidden to think that perhaps gravitation, a force, procreates matter, a thing, in order that the effects of the fore may be perceived by dull sense. We are told that the function of the liver and the brain depends on the structure of the liver and the brain respectively and we are not allowed to think that perhaps the force of animal life, feeling the need of an instrument to secrete bile, on the one hand, and to secrete cerebral lymph to act as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought and emotion and higher things, on the other, introduces the liver with its elaborate structure and the brain with its still more complicated structure, in order that both the one function and the other may be well performed. And so, although all forms of kinetic energy (and among them zoo-dynamic, or the force of animal life) manifest warmth and luminosity as qualities, science attributes animal heat to chemic force and refuses to consider that perhaps zoo-dynamic uses chemico-dynamic for its own purposes, even if these purposes are unconscious, because the higher force always dominates the lower. Properly speaking, science is out of her sphere, though she does not seem to know it, in making these suggestions. When she keeps herself to the investigation of facts, their exposition, their sequence and their laws, in her painstaking and accurate manner, we accept her revelations thankfully, and beg her to allow us to make our own philosophic and other explanations in attempting to account for the existence, sequences and relations of the facts of life.

After his return home, patient continued to gain weight, as might have been expected. On the seventeenth day after ending the fast he weighed 140 lbs. and on the nineteenth day 144 lbs. On that day he received from a hospital a report that the reaction of the physiologico-pathological test was negative. This has naturally had a great effect on the patient; and it is worthy of very careful consideration. Of course one negative result may not be conclusive although it was positive before the fast. But if the result should be repeated, and especially if it should prove to be permanent, the importance of the fact can hardly be exaggerated, since the suggestion arises in our minds that perhaps we may be able to cure profound blood-poisoning by fasting, neither the usual treatment nor the use of Salvarsan enabling the investigator to say that the result of the pathological reaction was negative; but this has followed after a heroic fast of 56 days. The result if confirmed would not be unique. Quite recently I saw a specific ulcer close to the ankle-joint for which operation had been recommended. It seemed to me that operation would be likely to open the joint, and that therefore it was a risky proceeding. But under a restriction of the diet, putting the young man on barley-water for a few days and then advising him to eat once a day only, the ulcer became very much smaller, and no operation has had to be performed. Blood-poisoning of this nature, of course, is not caused by improper nutrition, but it may readily be believed to be aggravated by the ordinary conventional over-feeding to which, so far as I can see, we are all subjecting ourselves, especially as persons who put themselves in the way of contracting blood-poisoning do not generally belong to the class of those who are attracted by the suggestion that it is noble to keep the body under, and that if we do not strive to keep the body under, it will be very likely to keep us under. Although we shall be liable to be infected, however we live, still we may believe that we shall be more likely to be badly infected (if we put ourselves in the way of contracting disease) if we have been previously subjected to the bad effects of over-feeding. This consideration renders a possible cure by fasting, a not impossible suggestion. And if, therefore, we have in fasting the suggestion of a remedy which offers us the hope of eradicating such a fearful disease from the human system, it certainly behoves us to make use of it.

As a rule it seems to me that bad forms of blood-poisoning of this nature are incurable. In three or four generations they destroy the strain affected by it, do what we will. Meantime it shows all the signs and symptoms of a hereditary disease, for the children are born suffering, showing a coppery rash, and old before they are young. And when they get a little older they have no bridges to their noses, their teeth are ill-formed, their vision is imperfect, their intellects dull. It seems as if nature could not forgive crimes of this nature. She seems to treat them as the unpardonable sin. If we find cancer appearing in a family at 55 years of age in 3 or 4 successive generations, there is no proof of heredity in that. Inquire and see if like causes acting on like organisms in 3 or 4 successive generations have not produced the disease each time. The children are not born cancerous, and our efforts to prevent the disease may succeed. But children often are born with specific disease, and there is no doubt at all about its being a hereditary disease. Even now I should not like to sanction marriage in the case of this man who has heroically fasted for 56 days, although he seems for the present to have got rid of his disease. But the outlook is hopeful, more hopeful than I thought, and in the hope that the suggestion may convey a message of hope to those who are willing to do penance for crimes against the body, I send out these remarks. The opinion expressed by the patient that he was getting rid of the Salvarsan which had been injected into his blood to cure his disease is, of course, his own only. I offer no opinion upon it. But I think the whole case very instructive, and it will be deeply interesting to follow it up with special regard to the inquiry whether the pathological test remains negative. The reflective reader of these remarks will need no hint from me to suggest how a study of questions of this sort raises in our minds all sorts of other questions, physical, metaphysical, philosophical, social, religious; what are laws of nature, how they come to be what they are, whether they can be disregarded without paying the penalty, and whether we men are bond or free. Each of us will settle these questions for ourselves, for each of us is responsible for his own conclusion. But as to the inevitableness with which such questions do rise in our minds, I take it there can be no difference of opinion.

A. Rabagliati.