B942 <=> B944 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 943]

“Existing in the said way in this central point of the beings of this big contemporary group and rubbing shoulders on various occasions with the various types among them, I just then without any premeditation but thanks only to my acquired habit of collating material, so to say ‘by the way,’ for those statistics of mine, which, as I have already told you, I gathered during the whole of my last personal sojourn among your favorites for the purpose chiefly of comparing the extent to which all the illnesses and all the strange what are called ‘being subjective vices’ existing among the beings of the different groups are spread, I constated a fact which greatly interested me, namely, the fact that in the common presences of almost half of all the three-brained beings I met there, the proceeding functioning of the transformation of the first being-food is disharmonized, that is, as they themselves would say, their digestive organs are spoiled; and that almost a quarter of them have or are candidates for that form of disease specific to beings there, which they call ‘impotence,’ thanks just to which disease a great many of the contemporary beings of your planet are forever deprived of the possibility of continuing their species.

“When I chanced to constate this, a great interest in the beings of just this new group arose in me, and I thereupon changed my previously determined mode of existence among them, and allotted half my time from my personal rest to special observation and investigation of the causes of this fact – for me so strange and for them so deplorable. In pursuit of this aim I even took occasion to visit various other provincial points of the beings of this new contemporary group; though I stayed nowhere more than one or two days, with the exception of the city ‘Boston,’ or, as it is sometimes called, ‘the city of the people who escaped race degeneration.’ There I existed for a whole week.