the physical bond between the inherited properties of an organism and that peculiarity of the germ by virtue of which it is able in its turn to reproduce the maternal qualities."

Whatever the peculiar sympathies of organs during the pregnant state be due to, it can hardly be maintained that they have an obvious nervous mechanism. The breasts, the ovaries and the uterus are just those organs of which the experimental nerve-physiology has been able to make nothing. So far from the organ of germ-formation" (the ovary) being in closer relation to the nervous system than other organs, there is no great organ of the body whose function, apart from its vascularity, is so entirely beyond nervous interference. The reproductive process as a whole affords us the best illustrations of deeply rooted memories; but its organs are as a matter of fact those with which nervous mechanisms have least to do.

The memory which has nervous mechanism at its service is no doubt peculiar or unique in certain respects; but there is another sort of memory, no less tenacious, which is largely independent of the nervous system or of its co-ordinating, directing or controlling influence. Although some of the best instances of morbid habit are developments of memory on a nervous footing; there are other instances, such as the mesoblastic tumours already mentioned, where nervous mechanism is practically excluded; and there are a good many more where the nervous agency, although present as a co-ordinating power, is of

secondary importance as regards the persistency or inveteracy of habit.

The maladies that seem to offer the most familiar illustrations of that kind of memory and habit are, catarrhs become chronic. These are among the commonest and most troublesome of disorders. In many of them, such as those where there is no abiding or structural cause, the chronicity stands in need of theoretical elucidation; while the treatment, for all its undoubted success, continues to be random and empirical, and remains to be brought under some rational principle.

Let us take the common case of catarrh of the respiratory or the urethral mucous membrane. The first effect of the excitation, whether a chill or the contact of infective particles from a previous case, is to make the ordinarily moist mucous membrane dry, swollen, red, tender and irritable. Then a discharge begins which becomes by degrees thick and opaque, and by corresponding degrees diminishes until the mucous membrane remains at its ordinary moistness. If the catarrhal process be analysed, it will be found that the total suppression of the ordinary moisture of the mucous membrane, which is the direct effect of the turgescence following the upsetting stroke, is succeeded by an altogether unusual action of the epithelial cells. The suppression of the moisture is not followed at once by a restoration of the same; the return to the ordinarily moist and comfortable state of the surface is a work of time, a definite and uniform series

of steps remaining to be gone through. What are those uniform stages?

Briefly stated, they are a return, for a short time, to a more elementary, primitive, or embryonic kind of epithelial function. To quote a general principle that I have stated elsewhere: "Nothing marks so generally the disease-incidents of life as crudity or recrudescence in the activities of cells, tissues, organs, or mechanisms. In other words, we shall find much in pathology to show that, when the organism goes wrong, it retreats to broader ground, or reverts to modes of life which it had come through." The catarrhal secretion of a mucous membrane is such a retreat to broader ground, a step backwards for a time. The ordinary moisture of an epithelial surface comes from the individual epithelial cells, but it comes from them by a refined and delicate process which does not seem to touch their integrity or cause any great convulsion of their structure. The most that one can see of the process is a small bead of mucus detaching itself from the free end of the cell. But in the catarrhal state the refinement and subtilty of function is lost for the time being. The mucus forms in an obvious cavity of the cell, often the nucleus becomes free in the cavity, the cell is disintegrated, the fluid is produced at the expense of the epithelial cell bodily, and is accompanied by a large quantity of solid or nuclear elements -the catarrhal cells.

This is a crude or cumbrous way of producing secretion which may be studied in perfectly healthy

states of many of the lower animals and in some of the more recent glandular acquisitions of the higher animals, such as the breast in its periodical states of unfolding and subsidence. There are certain facts also to show that the epithelial functions in the earlier periods of life are more apt to be attended by cellular or nuclear by-products (such as the great number of lymphatic follicles or collections of lymphoid cells in the digestive mucous membrane of the child). It is, indeed, unnecessary to strain the facts in order to make out catarrhal secretion to be a reversion to a more primitive type of epithelial activity.

The retreat is only for a time; by degrees the function advances again to its more perfect or finished type. It is needless to illustrate the fact that a cold in the head, or a gonorrhea, lasts a definite and, as it were, a prescribed time. The cycle is a curve which is on the whole remarkably uniform. But, supposing that a gonorrhoea becomes a gleet, how do we state the fact in terms such as those that we purpose using? The primitive or developmental memory becomes a habit; the temporary display of embryonic activity— the inevitable reparative sequel of the injurythreatens to usurp the ground for good.

This, then, we shall find entering into our definition of some morbid habits-that the continuance is continuance on a lower plane, that the activity which tends to persist is an activity that has been resuscitated from the past. Of forms of morbid habit which are not built upon the foundation of developmental reminiscences we

shall have examples in the sequel. But it seems to be an essential point in the formation of habit without the aid of nervous mechanisms, or with such aid subordinate, that the continuing process shall be a process of the rudimentary or developmental type.

A gleet, then, is a functional habit of the urethral epithelium on the basis of a temporary return to a primitive type of activity, or on the basis of a transitory catarrh; and it is none the less a functional habit that the mucous membrane as a whole may assume corresponding structural alterations. Rooted or incessant bronchial catarrhs, where there is no congestion from heart disease, are of the same nature; so also are some persistent or recurrent diarrhoeas. The mucous membrane acts so when the ordinary incitement to such action is wanting, or upon provocation so slight as would not have induced the action but for the old memory of it.

In

The most convenient way of continuing the subject will be to introduce the question of treatment. such cases of chronic disorder (and in others to be mentioned in the sequel) it is the chronicity that has to be treated even more than the disease. If the habit were but once broken, the normal functional and structural life of the organ or part would reassert itself in the natural course of things. The usurpation would be at an end, the protracted incident would be closed. The class of remedial agents which perform the important service of breaking a morbid habit are the old established, highly valued, but vaguely defined class of alteratives.