grown out of patience at the long continuance of this barbarous custom, will take the trouble to put five hundred beautiful little gold and silver fishes into a bladder of the filthiest water he can obtain, and then, attaching a weight, throw the whole into a clear, crystal stream, he may justly say,-ay, and he may grin as he says it,"Behold an epitome of a London drawing-room!" And yet there exists one difference; for, while the human congregation is wilfully breathing an unwholesome mixture, the tiny creatures within the globule are as innocent of the foul suffering they endure as are those poor, lean, Neapolitan curs which, almost every day throughout the year, may be seen half choked by the rope that is dragging them towards the Grotto del Cane, in order that one more good-humoured, ruddy-faced, inquisitive English family may see them forcibly suffocated in unwholesome gas.

From the foregoing facts, should it become apparent that even among people of the highest rank, intelligence, and wealth, there has hitherto existed a lamentable neglect on a subject of such importance to them as the sanitary purification of the atmosphere in which they are living, it is reasonable à fortiori to infer that if any one among us would make it his painful duty to penetrate into the courts, alleys, workshops, and residences of the lowest, of the most ignorant, and of the most destitute classes of our society, he would most surely detect a still greater disregard of scientific precautions, directly and flagrantly productive of misery and disease.

Now if there was nothing at stake but the health, hap

piness, moral conduct, and condition of the labouring classes, the searching investigation unveiled in Mr. Chadwick's Report, coupled with the remedial measures submitted by him for consideration, ought to win as well as claim our most serious attention; but when we reflect that the air the labouring classes breathe; the atmosphere which by nuisances they contaminate, is the fluid in which rich and poor are equally immersed; that it is a commonwealth in which all are born, live, and die equal; it is undeniable that a sanitary inquiry into the condition, for instance, of the ten thousand alleys, lanes, courts, etc., which London is said to contain, becomes a subject in which every member of the community is self-interested. Where nearly two millions of people are existing together in one town, it is frightful to consider what must be the result in disease, if every member should, even to a small amount, be neglectful of cleanly habits. It is frightful also to contemplate what injury we may receive, not only from the living, but from the fifty thousand corpses which are annually interred in our Metropolis; indeed no man who will visit our London churchyards can gaze for a moment at the black, cohesive soil, saturated with putrid animal matter, which is daily to be seen turned up for the faithless reception of new tenants, without feeling that the purification of our great cities, and a watchful search throughout the land we live in for every removable cause of disease, are services which science should be proud to perform, which a parental Government should strenuously encourage, and which Parliament should deem its bounden duty to enforce.

If foul air and pure air were of different colours, we should very soon learn to repel the one and invite the other; in which case, every house would be ventilated, and air-pipes, like gas-pipes and water-pipes, would flow around us in all directions. Although however we do not often see miasma, yet, in travelling over the surface of the globe, how evident are its baneful effects, and how singularly identical are they with those patches of disease which are to be met with, more or less, in every district of this country! Let any one, after traversing the great oceans, contrast their healthful atmosphere with the low, swampy parts of India, with the putrid woods of the Shangallah in Abyssinia, or with any part of the western coast of Africa. In all these regions miasma is either constantly or periodically generated by the corruption of vegetable matter; and the following description of the effects of this virus on the white population of Sierra Leone is more or less equally applicable to all:

"Those who are not absolutely ill are always ailing ; in fact, all the White people seem to belong to a population of invalids. The sallowness of their complexion, the listlessness of their looks, the attenuation of their limbs, the instability of gait, and the feebleness of the whole frame, that are so observable in this climate, are but too evident signs, even where organic disease has not yet set in, that the disordered state of the functions, which goes under the name of impaired health, exists, and in none is it more painfully evident than in the general appearance of the European women and children of this colony."*

* Vide Appendix to Report from the Select Committee on West Coast of Africa, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 5th August, 1842, p. 244.

In corroboration of this statement, we may mention as a single example that, out of 150 men of the 2nd West India Regiment, who in 1824 were sent to Cape Coast Castle, all, excepting one, were either dead or sent home invalided in three months. At the expiration of this time, Sir John Phillimore, arriving off the coast in command of the 'Thetis,' sent on shore two midshipmen and fourteen men, to mount a gun on a height. The party slept there only a night, yet, in one fortnight, every individual excepting a black man was dead!

In the opposite continent of America, even in healthy regions, wherever the land has been flooded for the purpose of canal navigation, the trees all die, and, as the passenger-barge winds its way by moonlight through these pale, barkless corpses, we have seen a green coating of vegetable matter, about as thick as a blanket, and very appropriately called by the inhabitants "fever and ague," writhing in folds before the prow.

Even in the most salubrious of the new settlements, where the air had hitherto been always pure, dry, exhilarating, and the sky as blue as in Italy, the moment the virgin earth is by the emigrant turned up for the first time, the decomposition of vegetable matter brought to the surface invariably produces sickness; and thus a whole family of little English children, with their teeth chattering from ague, have too often been found mourning in the wilderness, on an oasis, "the garden and the grave" of their father who made it.

In like manner, in this country, it has been shown by abundant evidence that on whatever patches of land, es

pecially in towns, vegetable or animal matter is allowed to putrefy, there disease, more or less virulent, is engendered; indeed it has been repeatedly observed that the inhabitants of a particular house have continued for years to be constantly afflicted with the very languor and fever described by every African traveller, which at last has been ascertained to have been caused by the introduction, into the immediate neighbourhood, of a couple of square feet of Sierra Leone; or, in plainer terms, by a grated untrapped gully-drain, from which there has been constantly arising a putrid gas: and yet, instead of a few square feet, how many acres of Sierra Leone are, to our shame, existing at this moment in our Metropolis, in the shape of churchyards! For instance, there is one burial-ground, now in use in London, which contains, under an acre of surface, 60,000 corpses! In another spot, a crowd of young children are, at this moment, learning their lessons for six hours per day over a floor under which 12,000 dead bodies are festering !*

Mr. Chadwick produces a tabular account of the mortality of England and Wales within the year 1838, caused by diseases, which, he says, medical officers consider to be most powerfully influenced by the physical circumstances under which the population is placed; namely, the external and internal condition of their dwellings, drainage, and ventilation. In this category, the number of deaths amounted to 56,461: which Mr. Chadwick, truly enough, observes to be as if Westmore

*See evidence taken before the Committee of the House of Commons on the Improvement of Towns, etc., printed in 1842.