To consider in the fullest and 1vost impartial manner possible the results achieved by the labour of the Sanitarian, it is necessary to analyse the whole of the Registrar-General's Returns, from 1838, when systematic registration of deaths was undertaken, One striking fact brought out by those Returns is thus summed up by one of the Vice-Presidents of the Institute of Actnaries under the head of 'Mortality.' "La discussing this well-worn theme," be says, "the first feeling must be one of disappointment, An impression prevails among medical men espesiall that the duration of life is extending, and that it will be yet farther advanced by sanitary improvements. Is there any evidence of this? Daring the past forty years large sums of money have been expended in sanitary improvements, and what has been the effect on the mortality of the population? Discarding individual years in which there had been fluctuations in both directions from various causes, it happens curiously enough that in each of the three decennial periods 1841-50, 1851-60, 1861-70, the rate of mortality has been identical viz, 28.35 per 1,000." Views similar to these were very strongly expressed by Mr. Hawksley, C. E., President of the Health Section, at the Liverpool meeting of the Social Soieuce Congress in 1876. He took a very decidedly deprecia couraging view of th science, roundly asserting that sanitary mon sures can exercise only a very limited control over epidemic diseases and are not capable of materially extending those limits of life which nature has in her wisdom prescribed. He declared that during the thirty-six years 1836 to 1873, there bad not been an atom of movement towards the extension of human life in England, and that an effort to check the pellation of rivers, at the risk of injuring trade interests, was suntohing at the shadow and leaving the substance. The most striking facts are, iuorense in the diarrhooal group; the addition of the new zymotic diphtheria (since 1851), and the smal! domination of typhoid in the fever group; that excremental-pollution diseases, the result of carelessness in the disposal of our oxoret, and the drinking of water and breathing of air contaminated by it in state of decomposition. Years ago most people had implicit faith in water carriage for the removal of the refuse of communities; but faller investigation, experiment, and exporience have shaken, if not altered, the is of our sanitarinns, We have learned by the law of diffusion of gases that gases absorbed on the sewer side of the trap, may be discharged on the house side of the sume, and it has been observed that lead pipes open at the top to the oxterunl air Inst longer than those that are closed, showing their destruction by the gas generated. Kidney and bowel secretions decompose slowly if kept separate; if mixed, more rapidly; and if water be added, the process is greatly accelerated. Water, chemically speaking, has no purifying power—the air dissolved in it is the only purifying element it contains. Inashallow hartl-{ng brook this power is considerable, but in a deep sluggish river it is very slight, and hence the pellation of our rivers by organic refuse. Water is thoro-fore a mere shunter, moving it from one place to deposit it elsewhere:—it conveys, but doos not destroy, organic recase. Woe are not defending the old Intrine system, but we think the water carriage was adopted without sufficient investigation and without any adequate conception of the results which would follow. We hailed the aystem asa great boon to comfort and decency, and we supposed that offensive matters once out of sight there was an end of their and their evil consequences.
Another cogent reason for not pass ing these offensive matters into our rivers or the s that in the economy of natare there is no waste. The law of rotation of Mother Earth seema to be that it is plants from whiobanimals draw their support, and that that which is rejected by animals should be restored to the earth. The carbonic acid freely given off by animals' is at once utilised for the growth of plants, and there are those who believe that if this had been left to our own disposal, the whole world would have been asphyxiated long ago. The other exoretions of animals are equally necessary for the growth of the vegetable world; and Dr. Ferguson, author of an address on the State of Preventative M cine at the British Medical Association held in 1879, some of the prominent points of whose able lecture we have given above, concludes with those weighty worde:—" After years of fare ther stady and investigation I oan only adlere to my opinion, expressed many years ago, that if it is trae that organic Poisons producing disease may pass from sewage, if it is trae that cholera diphtheria, typhoid fever, and diarrhas are traceable to taking into our systems, by air-crevices, the results of decomposition of human excreta; if it is true that these diseases and others from the same causes well our death. rate, I affirm that the only true sanitary solution of our difficulties is, that all excreta shall either be retuned to the earth or subjected to chemical action rendering decomposition impossible, And I am furthermore cure that if a tithe of the time, skill, and ingenuity, and one thousandth part of the money that have been devoted to water car. riage bad been spent in investigations in this direction, the problem of the sewage question would have been solved long ago."
The time has come, it seems to us, when we must either reconsider the prevalent ideas regarding the value of sanitation, or our ideas of the dit Itis nota little remarkable that the very diseases which were expected to receive their deathblow from sanitary science, and to be numbered among the. things of the past, are precisely those that are as rampant as ever. It must have struck very thoughtful person who has been in China, that either our Weatom ideas of sanitation and the cause of disease are seriously at fault, or that there is some as yet unknown peculiarity of the Chinese constitution. On our hypothesis, this vast Empire should have centuries ago been swept off the face of the earth without leaving a solitary sou of Han to proclaim the cause of his exodus, If bad smells cause disease, why do the Ohinese, and foreigners who live among them too, for that matter, not suffer in consequence? Ought not
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.