lilies and roses? The doctor, by way of answer,
published, in 1750, a book entitled De Tabe
Glandulari, seu de Usu Aquæ Marinæ (On
Glandular Disease, or the Use of Sea-Water).
His object was, through its use, not to cure but
to remake and recreate his patients. He
proposed to work a miracle, although a possible
miracle; namely, to make new flesh, to create
fresh tissues. It follows clearly that he greatly
preferred to work upon children. At that
period, Bakewell had just invented meat; cattle,
which had hitherto scarcely supplied anything
else besides milk, were in future to yield a more
generous aliment. Russell, on his part, by this
little book, most opportunely invented the sea;
that is to say, he made it the fashion.

His whole system may be resumed in one
word—THE SEA. You must drink sea-water;
you must bathe in it, and you must eat all sorts
of marine things—shell-fish, fish proper,
seaweeds (there is not a single poisonous marine
vegetable), in which its virtue is concentrated.
Secondly, Dr. Russell ordered his scrofulous
children to be very slightly clad, and always
exposed to the air; sea-air and sea-water, at
their natural temperatures, and nothing more,
were his remedies. The latter prescription was
bold and decided practice, which is followed
with considerable modifications by practitioners
of the present day. To keep a child half-naked
in a damp and variable climate, amounted to
a resolution to sacrifice the weakliest. The
strongest only would survive; and the race,
perpetuated by them alone, would be reinstated
in its pristine vigour.

Last December, M. Michelet received a small
pamphlet from Italy. Opposite the title-page
were the portraits of two children, of whom one
died and the other was dying, in the hospitals
of Florence. Its author was the hospital doctor,
who took the fate of his little patients so keenly
to heart that he could not help expressing his
sorrow and regret; for which he alleges as his
excuse, that "These dear children would not
have died, if they could have been sent to the
sea." Conclusion: A hospital for children
must be established on the coast. The doctor's
appeal went home to people's hearts. Without
waiting for government assistance, an independent society immediately founded a Children's
Bathing Establishment, at Viareggio.

The benevolent Florentine's idea had already
been anticipated in France by Messieurs Frère
and Perrochaud (the former sub-inspector of
the assisted children belonging to the Department
of the Seine, who are placed out in the
arrondissement of Montreuil-sur-Mer; the latter
the physician charged with the medical care
of the said children), who, in April, 1857,
placed in the village of Groffiers, on the Channel
coast, several children in a desperate state of
rachitism and scrofulism.

The reader here ought to be informed that
the Administration Générale de l'Assistance
Publique at Paris is almost a sort of ministry,
rivalling in importance the Ministry of the
Interior, the Ministry of War, the Ministry of
Worship and Public Instruction, or any other
branch of the government. Its office is a
large building close to Notre Dame. It manages
the affairs of all hospitals, infirmaries,
almshouses, foundling hospitals, out-door and in-door
relief, and every other public act of charity
connected with the department of the Seine. Its
powers are very great; lately, it has
established hospitals of convalescence for sick
persons recovering from illnesses, who have been
treated in hospitals proper, or elsewhere; and
we see that it has sent scrofulous children to
the sea-side. It has immense revenues at its
disposal, roughly estimated at from two hundred
and fifty thousand, to three hundred thousand
pounds sterling per annum. It levies a tribute
of ten per cent on the profits of all theatrical
performances, balls, concerts, circuses, and
amusements of every kind, in Paris. It has
landed property, interest from funds, payments
from public markets, profits of the Mont-de-
Piété, or Public Pawnbroker, a good slice out of
the income of the octroi tax, besides the special
endowments of the hospitals, &c. The whole
of this money must be expended on charitable
purposes only, and not on paving, drainage, or
any other work of public utility, however
recommendable. Any one who has served for
thirty years in a hospital, or other charitable
establishment in Paris, is entitled to a
maintenance for life from the Administration Générale
de l'Assistance Publique. It will be seen,
therefore, what an enormous power for good is
wielded by the director-general.

The cure, by sea-bathing, of the above-
mentioned little patients encouraged MM. Frère
and Perrochaud to demand from the director-
general, an authorisation to place, by way of
experiment, in a private house on the beach at
Berck, as many scrofulous children as could be
attended to by the person who undertook to
board and lodge them. In '58 and '59, more
than fifty children of both sexes, sent to Berck
by the Administration, were completely cured
of the scrofulous affections under which they
were suffering.

These results, as satisfactory as they were
unexpected, decided the Administration, in the
month of May, 1860, to confide to Messieurs
Frère and Perrochaud more than sixty of their
scrofulous and rickety protégés. In
consequence of the salutary influence of sea-bathing
on these last patients, Monsieur le Directeur
Général, wishing to give the scrofulous children
under his administration a new proof of his
incessant solicitude for their welfare, authorised
the erection, on the beach at Berck, of a
hospital containing one hundred beds: which are
now occupied, in the proportion of a third each,
by scrofulous children selected from the
hospitals Sainte Eugénie, des Enfants Malades,
and des Enfants Assistés. Every child, before
its departure, is carefully examined, and a note
of its condition is drawn up by competent
physicians belonging to the Paris hospitals. All the
details of the treatment of each, with the effects
of sea-side residence and saline baths, on the