DR. JOHN MADISON TAYLOR
ness than in beauty, and in passing I may say that the ugliness is increasing, if not in degree, certainly in number. The cult of the beautiful and the noble belongs to the religious age, the age of worship, of veneration, of respect, of loyalty, of fidelity—all the qualities that are now often mocked at and despised. Beauty can be cultivated as flowers are: and it was cultivated in the times gone by when women were content to be women, and not freakish men. That old supercherie of Jacob's when he played the trick on Laban, his father-in-law, by placing parti-coloured withes before the ewes, is a well-known pathological, rather than psychological, manifestation of the effect, through the eyes, either for good or for ill upon the unborn. There is nothing more elevating to the human mind than the aspect of things that appeal to the emotion of beauty, either in the music of running water, the fragrance of flowers, or the blue of the sky. He who has known how a feeling of the most profound depression gives place to elation when a day dawns that vibrates with a musical twang in wind and sky, in rustling trees and rippling river, although the cause for depression still exists, can understand the mystical relation between cause and effect in the transmission of beautiful forms into beautiful thoughts. No one knows better than Dr. Taylor the disastrous effect upon mankind of neglecting those aids to health and beauty which are to be found in the right stimulation of the senses and the well-ordered indulgence in the emotions. There is a pathological side to all manifestations of life—to this side Dr. Taylor gives unremitting observation and attention. He is the convinced advocate of what some people would call a theory, but which nevertheless is a fact, that the mental constitution and equipment of one-fifth of the inhabitants of a nation
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