dition of the Icelandic population, should have disclosed the existence of almost precisely similar habits of life among them, with almost precisely the same results. The dwellings of the great bulk of the peasantry seem as if constructed for the express purpose of poisoning the air which they contain. They are small and low, without any direct provision for ventilation, the door serving alike as window and chimney; the walls and roof let in the rain, which the floor, chiefly composed of hardened sheep's-dung, sucks up; the same room generally serves for all the uses of the whole family, and not only for the human part of it, but frequently also for the sheep, which are thus housed during the severest part of the winter. The fuel employed in this country chiefly consists of cow-dung and sheep's-dung, caked and dried; and near the sea-coast, of the bones and refuse of fish and seafowl; producing a stench, which to those unaccustomed to it is completely insupportable. In addition to this, the people are noted for their extreme want of personal cleanliness; the same garments (chiefly of black flannel) being worn for months without having even been taken off at night. Although the Icelanders enjoy an almost complete exemption from many diseases (such as consumption) which are very fatal elsewhere, and the number of births is fully equal to the usual average, the population of the island does not increase, and in some parts actually diminishes. This result is in great measure due, as at St. Kilda, to the very high rate of infantile mortality; a large proportion of all the infants born being carried off before they are a fortnight old. It is in the little island of Westmannoe, and the opposite parts of the coast of Iceland, where the bird-fuel is used all the year round, instead of (as elsewhere) during a few months only, that the rate is the highest; the average mortality for many years having been sixty-four out of every hundred, or nearly two out of three, of all the infants born in these localities.

But it is yet more remarkable that the immediate cause of the high rate of infantile mortality should have been precisely the same in the Workhouses of London, the Lying-in Hospital of Dublin, and the close filthy huts of the peasantry of Iceland and St. Kilda; for it was almost entirely referrible to one single disease, "Trismus nascentium," or, "Lock-jaw of the New-born;" and this disease has diminished in exact

proportion to the improvement of the places it previously infested, in respect to ventilation and cleanliness. Thus, it is so rare for a case of it now to occur in London, that many practitioners of large experience have never seen the disease. In the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, the number of deaths from it has been reduced to three or four yearly. And there cannot be a reasonable doubt, that, by due attention to the same conditions, it might be exterminated from Iceland and from St. Kilda. There is scarcely, in fact, a disease incident to humanity, which is more completely preventible than this; and yet the annual sacrifice of life which it formerly caused in our own country alone, might have been reckoned by tens of thousands.

Although the peculiar susceptibiltty of the constitution of children, gives to foul air and other causes of disease a much more destructive influence over them, than the like causes have over persons more advanced in life, yet it is now well ascertained that the rate of mortality among different classes of the community varies in a degree which bears a very close relation to the nature of the conditions under which they live. Thus, whilst the annual average number of deaths in the whole of England and Wales is about 22 out of every thousand persons living, there are localities in which the annual average exceeds 50 in a thousand, and others in which it falls as low as 11 in a thousand. And it is not a little remarkable, that the difference is almost entirely referrible to the mortality produced by Fevers and allied diseases, which, as experience has now fully demonstrated, are absolutely preventible by due attention to the ordinary conditions of health.

As the population of England and Wales may at present be estimated at about twenty millions, and its actual mortality at about 440,000, what may be termed its inevitable mortality— arising from diseases that would not be directly affected by sanitary improvements-would be only one half, or 220,000; so that the same number of lives may be considered to be annually sacrificed by the public neglect of the means of preserving them, the deaths from typhus alone being no fewer than 50,000. But as it is scarcely to be supposed that every part of our population could be placed in conditions as favourable as those which prevail where the rate of mortality is the lowest, we may take 13 per thousand as the average to

which it may be safely affirmed, on the basis of actual experience, that the annual mortality may be reduced, by such efficient sanitary measures as render the dwellings of the mass of the population fit for human habitation; this would give an annual mortality for England and Wales of 260,000, showing a saving of 180,000 lives annually in that one portion of the British empire. And it must be remembered that this amount of mortality represents a vastly greater amount of sickness, since, for every death, there are numerous cases of severe illness; so that it would be scarcely too much to affirm that at least a million out of the whole number of such cases annually occurring, are preventible, like the 180,000 deaths, by adequate provisions for the supply of pure air and water, and by efficient sewerage for the removal of decomposing matters. It cannot be doubted that, even in a mere pecuniary point of view, the expense of such arrangements would be amply compensated by the prevention of a vast amount of that loss of productive labour of various kinds, which is at present due to disease; and, considered on the large scale, as a question of social economy, the importance of sanitary legislation can scarcely be over-rated. But much cannot be expected to be done in this direction, until such an intelligent public opinion shall have been created, by the general diffusion of sound physiological information, as shall be sufficiently forcible to bear down the self-interested opposition of those, who do not see that the value of their property will be permanently increased at least in proportion to the amount of money judiciously expended upon it.

A more remarkable illustration of what is to be effected by sanitary improvements can scarcely be adduced, than that which is presented by the comparison between the locality termed "the Potteries," in the immediate vicinity of Kensington, and the "Model Lodging-houses," which have been erected in various parts of the Metropolis. The site of the group of dwellings constituting the former is far from being insalubrious in itself, and rows of handsome houses are rising up in its immediate neighbourhood; but the condition of these dwellings is most filthy. A few years ago, as many as 3,000 pigs were kept in this locality (the number has since been somewhat diminished); and the boiling of fat and other offal, which is carried on by some of the pig-feeders, some

times taints the air for a mile round. Very few of the tenements have any water-supply; the wells are useless, or worse than useless, through the contamination of their water with putrescent liquid which filters down into them; and the drainage of the dwellings both for men and pigs is almost entirely superficial, being chiefly discharged into a stagnant piece of water called the "Ocean,” which is covered with a filthy slime and bubbles with poisonous gases, and very commonly has dead dogs or cats floating on its surface. It is difficult to conceive anything more horribly offensive than the rears of some of the houses, whose yards are filled with ordure and other filth collected for manure, which is here stored for weeks, or even months, until an opportunity occurs for selling it. And even the public ways are generally covered with black putrescent mire. Now, during ten months of the year 1852, when no epidemic prevailed, as many as forty deaths occurred in the Potteries, out of a population of about one thousand,—the mortality being thus at the rate of 48 per thousand annually; and no fewer than four-fifths of these deaths occurred at, or beneath, five years of age. In the first ten months of 1849, when cholera was prevalent, the number of deaths was fifty, or about one in twenty of the whole population, twenty-one of these being due to cholera and diarrhoea, and twenty-nine to typhus and other diseases.-On the other hand, in the whole population of the "Model Lodging-houses," amounting to 1,343, only seven deaths took place in the whole twelve months of 1852, or at the rate of scarcely more than 5 per thousand; and although they contain a large proportion of children, yet only half the number of deaths occurred below ten years old. During the prevalence of the cholera-epidemic, no cases of that disease occurred among them, although it was raging in their various neighbourhoods; and from the time that their drainage has been rendered thoroughly efficient, no case of fever has presented itself among their inmates.

The experience of Cholera-epidemics is peculiarly valuable, on account of the marked tendency of this disease to search out and expose defects, which have continued to produce other diseases year after year, without having been suspected as the causes of them. The greatest severity in each visitation has shown itself in identical localities, provided those

remained in the same foul state as at first; whilst new localities have been affected, just in proportion to the degree in which they have participated in the same conditions; and those originally attacked have escaped, wherever they had adopted the requisite means of purification. Thus, at Newcastle-onTyne and Gateshead, the first outbreak occurred in the very same streets, and even in the same houses, in the three visitations of 1831, 1848, and 1853. An outbreak which occurred in 1853, at Luton, in Bedfordshire,-where, out of a population of 126 persons, inhabiting twenty-five houses, no fewer than fifty-four attacks of choleraic disease, fifteen of them fatal, took place within three weeks, was most distinctly traceable to defect of sewerage, which had been previously manifesting its malign influence on the general health of the town. And the fearful pestilence which devastated the neighbourhood of Golden Square (London) in the autumn of 1854, was no less distinctly traceable to the contamination of the pump-water by the bursting of a sewer into the well. On the other hand, Exeter and Nottingham, which suffered severely in the first epidemic, escaped comparatively unharmed in the subsequent visitations; and this result is plainly due to the sanitary improvements which had been made in the interval. In 1832 there perished of the epidemic in Exeter, as many as 402, out of a population of 28,000, or no fewer than one in seventy; and a vast amount of suffering, with a heavy expense, was entailed upon the town. In 1848-9, on the other hand, out of a population of about 32,600, there were but 44 deaths, or less than one in seven hundred; and upwards of one-half of these occurred in a single parish, that lies very low, and in the midst of putrid exhalations from the city drains. In Nottingham, with a population of 50,000, there were 296 fatal cases of cholera in 1832, nearly all of these being in the lower part of the town, which was ill-drained, extremely filthy, and densely populated; but in 1848-9, though the population had increased to 58,000, the number of deaths from cholera was no more than 18, all of these occurring in localities, which, in spite of what had been done, retained much of their previous filth.

The foregoing are only samples of a vast number of cases which might be adduced, in proof of the absolute preventibility of Cholera, and of other diseases of the same class. It