tissue as an active irritant, causes inflammation, undergoes
softening, forms cavities, defies treatment, and rapidly hurries the
sufferers to a premature grave. These facts, taken in connection with
the immunity from lung diseases enjoyed by those whose respiratory
capacity is well developed and properly used, as well as the
beneficial effects that are promptly secured in the favorable
varieties of consumption by any important increase in the vital
volume, I believe fully justify the statement that _tubercles are the
results of defective nutrition directly traceable to inadequate
respiratory capacity_, either congenital or acquired--in other words,
tubercles are composed of particles of food which have failed to
acquire sufficient life while undergoing the vital processes, because
the person in whom they occur habitually breathed too little fresh
air.

Persons who possess what is called the scrofulous constitution are
specially liable to the occurrence of tubercular matter when their
respiration is defective, or they are exposed to any other influences
that favor its development in the organism. But habitually defective
respiration, or the breathing of an atmosphere containing too little
oxygen, which practically amounts to the same thing, has a very
powerful tendency in the same direction, in persons who are apparently
as free from scrofulous taint as any human being can be.


THE VALUE OF COD-LIVER OIL IN THE PREVENTION OF CONSUMPTION.

There is a broad but not commonly recognized distinction between what
constitutes a medicine and a food. All the materials that normally
enter into the composition of the living body, and are necessary to