On this occasion, when you might expect me to speak in the line of the specialty, the subject of human conservation may seem rather remote. It has none of the interest of novelty and has no problems for the laboratory except that oldest of laboratories in which the problems of life are being solved. The subject is familiar, but life is made of familiar things of which we find it necessary frequently to remind ourselves, and experience teaches that it is much more profitable to be reminded than to be instructed.
The existence of so much disease that is preventable, the increasing amount of insanity, feeble-mindedness and imbecility that are usually evidence of individual and family degeneracy, the poor showing of young men in our recent war conscription, and other conditions of bad import too numerous to be recounted have led me to consider at this time the subject of