deficiency in vegetable food. This is reported
upon by Dr. Robert Barnes, physician to the
Dreadnought, who shows that nearly half the men
admitted into the Sailors' Home at Poplar, are
suffering from scurvy at the time of their
admission, and that a twentieth part are seriously
diseased with it. Scurvy has furnished a
twenty-fourth part of all the cases admitted
during the last dozen years into the Dreadnought
Hospital Ship. Many cases never pass
through hospital, but lie in the low lodging-
houses by the waterside. Shipowners of Liverpool
and other northern ports, of Hamburg and
America, are said by Dr. Barnes to "exhibit
the greatest, amount of disregard of the safety
and health of their crews." There were
recently admitted to the Dreadnought, twelve
cases of severe scurvy from one ship in which
nineteen was the whole complement of officers
and men. A ship at sea, so disabled of men,
could not reef topsails or bring the ship to in a
gale of wind, and ships must sometimes, from
this cause, be lost at sea. Yet scurvy is
altogether a preventable disease. Vegetable
food is its one essential antidote. Lemon-juice
was introduced into the navy in the year seventeen
'ninety six; and in Haslar Hospital, which
before that time received upwards of fourteen
hundred cases in a year, scurvy is now an almost
unknown disease. There used also to be a land
scurvy when vegetable food was little used on
shore. In the merchant service, says Dr.
Barnes, scurvy is never known in the cabin, and
"if the captain and mates know how to preserve
themselves, they know how to preserve their
men." Scurvy would be rare if even the mere
provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act were
obeyed. Mr. Simon counsels inspection by the
officer of customs who boards ships arrived
from a long voyage, to secure fulfilment of the
requisite provisions of that act, as well as a
coroner's inquest upon every man who is
brought home to die of scurvy.

The next question is of employments hurtful
in themselves, or hurtfully conducted. Thus,
Dr. Whitley has been inquiring into the state of
workers in lead and mercury. These have their
lives shortened by hurtful employments, workers
of lead being better protected than they used to
be, though still suffering much from the poison
where the work causes lead-dust to float in the
air. Work upon quicksilver is either in water-
gilding—a process most injurious to health, but
employing few persons, and now being
superseded by electroplate—or in the far larger
business of mirror silvering, wherein our Health
Officer holds, that " employers should be bound
to provide all practicable arrangements for
lessening danger to their workpeople, and should
be prohibited from employing any person who
presents, even in ever so small a degree, any
sign of the characteristic metallic poisoning."

As to the unhealthy conduct of in-door work,
not in itself injurious, by the over-crowding and
bad ventilation, that breeds lung disease, by
working without necessary rest or otherwise—
three branches of industry, noted for frequent
sins of this sort, are investigated: the occupations
of the dressmakers and needlewomen, the
tailors, and the printers. Dressmakers suffer
by over-crowding and deficient ventilation less
than printers, printers less than tailors. Tailors
work in their close rooms for twelve and thirteen
hours a day, sometimes for fifteen or sixteen
hours; printers have lighter work upon a weekly
average, though there may be great strain at one
part of the week, especially in the printing-
offices of weekly newspapers. In printers and
tailors, consumption and other lung diseases are
in vast excess, and form two-thirds of all the
causes of death; while between the ages of
thirty-five and forty-five the mortality among
London printers is notably more than twice as
high as that of the male agricultural population.
This is not a fact to take for granted and let
alone. Mr. Simon asks that the effective
ventilation of all in-door work-places be made
compulsory by some appropriate provision of the law.

The next item in the Health Officer's Budget is
Dr. Whitley's inquiry into the extent of marsh
malaria in England, showing in what districts it
is especially necessary that improvements should
be made with a view to the complete (and
altogether possible) destruction of this enemy to
life and health. Upon this follows Dr. Hunter's
inquiry into the remarkably high rate of infant
mortality in certain marsh districts, which is
traced mainly to a peculiar custom of retaining
in familiar use the opium once used as a popular
remedy for ague. A retail druggist in the Fens
will regard opium as his leading article, and
sell as much as two hundred pounds of it
in a year, serving three or four hundred
customers on a Saturday night with penny sticks
or pills. A man in South Lincolnshire
complained that his wife had spent a hundred pounds
in opium since she married him. A man setting
about a hard job takes his pill to set him a-going,
and many never take their beer without dropping
a piece of opium into it. With the opium
believed in by the parents and nurses, children are
quieted, and quieted to death. Every village
shop puffs its own brew of the deadly " Godfrey."

The prevention of diseases that arise in
hospitals, as erysipelas after operation, or the
spread of contagious fevers—the whole large
question in fact of the healthy construction and
management of hospitals—is next opened. Dr.
Bristowe and Mr. Holmes report from personal
inspection upon almost every civil hospital of
note in England and Scotland, and upon the
chief hospitals in Ireland, describing and
commenting upon their construction, and reporting
facts that show the degree of their healthiness.
In this respect the great point for practical
consideration is the ventilation of wards. Gentle
and inoffensive currents of fresh air must scour
every corner, and " hitherto," says Mr. Simon,
in summing up the case, "without exception,
plans of artificial ventilation for wards have been
costly and fatal failures. . . . Whatever other
appliances exist, a ward must be perfectly
ventilable by its windows." The windows are the
chief natural inlet of air, and an important outlet;