troubled with scurvy, but drainage and improved
cultivation, by giving a more varied and full
supply of vegetables, have banished the disease.
In Scotland, scurvy was common a hundred
years ago, under the name of " blacklegs." We
still draw from the neighbouring countries of
the Continent much of the large supply of vegetable
necessary to the health of London; but in
the days of Henry the Eighth, scurvy might
well be common, for Queen Catherine, when she
wanted a salad, had to send a messenger for it
to Holland or Flanders,

But our great preserver against land scurvy
is the potato, which has the inestimable quality
of being storeable for winter use. By very
many the potato is almost the only vegetable
used, and that being used all the year round is
enough safeguard against scurvy. In the winter
and spring of the years eighteen 'forty-six and
seven, after a failure of the potato crop, there
was land scurvy both in Scotland and Ireland.
The railway labourers, who lived upon bread,
salt pork, salt butter, cheese, coffee, tea, and
sugar, suffered severely. The Irish, who have
always been great vegetable eaters, had never
in their history suffered so much from scurvy as
in that same year when green vegetables and
potatoes were excluded from the food of
thousands. When vegetables were supplied,
the sick were cured. So it is that, in towns
closely besieged, when vegetables fail, scurvy
breaks out. At Breda, in sixteen 'twenty-seven,
its attack was so terrible that it was
taken for the plague. The town had been
victualled only with bad rye, cheese, and dried fish.
At the siege of Thorn, five or six thousand of
the garrison and many townspeople perished of
scurvy, while, it being summer-time, the Swedes
outside, who had command of the green crops,
were free from the pestilence. A hundred years
ago, the British troops at Quebec, by constant
living upon salt provisions, suffered from scurvy,
and a thousand of them died before health was
restored by the use of onions, turnips, spruce
beer, and green vegetables. That the meat has
usually been salt meat in these cases is but an
accidental, not an essential condition. In the
middle of the last century, when Sisinghurst
Castle, in Kent, was full of French prisoners,
scurvy broke out among them for want of-
vegetable food, although their diet was fresh meat
and bread. Less than thirty years ago, there
was, from like cause, scurvy among troops at the
Cape who had no salt provisions. It used to be
not uncommon also in our penitentiaries and
prisons, when only fresh meat was used, but the
requirement of fresh vegetables was not
properly understood. Want of vegetables brought
the scourge of scurvy upon the allied armies at
the outset of the late Russian war. It was got
rid of by a distribution of vegetables and lime
juice, and in the navy it had hardly been felt at
all, for when the vegetables failed, there was the
supply of preserved lime juice to fall back upon,
and half an ounce a day of preserved lime juice
is found to compensate for the want of vegetable
food in its more customary forms.

Of old, in long sea voyages, scurvy seemed
unavoidable. During the expedition of Lord
Anson, in seventeen 'forty, and the four following
years, three ships that had left England with
nine hundred and sixty-one men, lost by scurvy
all but three hundred and thirty-five. Captain
Cook was the first to show the way to maintain
health at sea, and with his ship " Discovery,"
after a voyage of more than four years, returned
without loss of a single man. He took out a
large supply of sauer-kraut, made his men gather
wild eatable herbs, and eat them even if they
were unpalatable. He was particularly careful
also to make beer of the green tops of the
spruce fir, which he found to be an excellent
anti-scorbutic. Cook's lesson was not learnt
immediately by his countrymen. In seventeen
'eighty the squadron under Admiral Geary
returned to Portsmouth after a cruise of ten
weeks in the Bay of Biscay, with two thousand
four hundred men smitten by scurvy. Fifteen
years later an outbreak of scurvy imperilled the
safety of the whole Channel Fleet under Lord
Howe. The crews were restored to health by
oranges and salads, and since that time lemon
juice has been regularly supplied to the navy,
the result of its introduction being a sudden
and very great decrease of mortality. Scurvy,
except in rare cases of exigency, is a disease
now as little known in the royal navy as on land,
although its ships often remain at sea for periods
far beyond the ninety or hundred days, which is
usually the extreme limit of the voyage of a
merchant vessel without touching port. Voyages
of ninety or a hundred days are often made
under the conditions of the Emigration Service
without a death, yet it is a shameful fact that
in our general merchant service scurvy is
increasing rather than decreasing. In twelve years
the Dreadnought has received more than a
thousand cases, wanton neglect being the cause
of every one. Nearly half the men admitted in
London into the Home for Sailors are also
afflicted with scurvy; this gives more than
another thousand cases in the last seven years,
and a large but uncertain number of cases are
taken into the low lodging-houses of the water-
side. This in London alone; in a single
English port, where it is found that the ships
which maintain scurvy, are not exclusively
London ships. Of eighty-six cases of scurvy
admitted last year into the Dreadnought, only
fourteen belonged to vessels of the port of
London, one-and-twenty were from Liverpool
ships, eight belonged to Sunderland ships, two
to Glasgow, ten to other British ports, eleven to
Hamburg, and twenty to other foreign ports.
In Liverpool, therefore, and elsewhere, cases of
scurvy must be numerous. At Liverpool fifty
cases were admitted into the public hospitals
last year.

The scurvy ships are chiefly those which come
from Shanghae, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras,
Kurrachee, Colombo, and the Mauritius. Scurvy
has been produced in a Hamburg ship during a
voyage of only fifty-six days from St. Domingo,
and the number of days at sea varies from that