lowest number to a hundred and seventeen.
Yet when vessels have half their crews thus
disabled, captains straining to make short
voyages are known to run past St. Helena or
the Westem Isles, when a few hours' delay
would get enough fresh provisions to secure
the health of all on hoard. In ships that breed
scurvy, either there is no lime juice served out,
or it is bad, or some wilful men have refused to
take the lime juice, and have taken the scurvy.
Too often, the price of good lime juice being
grudged, a cheap and inefficient article,
manufactured for the market, is bought in its stead.
It fails, and then it is said that lime juice is of
no use, and not worth carrying at all. There is
also in the usual selection of provisions—salt
beef and pork, flour, peas, biscuit, tea or coffee,
sugar and rum—too little regard paid to their
anti-scorbutic quality. In the salting of meat it
is also to be remembered that the dry salt, first
rubbed in, forms with the juices of the meat a
brine, which is a concentrated soup, and that
the nutritive elements of meat thus extracted
are partly lost in boiling, or in the towing
overboard, not uncommon on board ship, where, the
sea-water being less salt than the brine of the
meat, the meat is washed by dragging through
the sea for some hours before cooking. Moreover,
when scurvy appears, the sore gums are
unable to masticate the hard salt, meat and
biscuit. The Crusaders used to suffer terribly
from scurvy, and it is said that they underwent
the torture of having their swollen and ulcerated
gums cut away by the barber before they could
eat.

Scurvy, expelled now from the land, from the
army, from the royal navy, from the emigrant
and convict ship, and from a large part of the
merchant navy, is bred only in the forecastle of
the ill-found merchant ship, among the common
sailors sacrificed by the owners to wring money
out of their very lives. In the cabin of the worst
found vessel, care enough is taken to prevent
scurvy from occurring, and it never does occur.
Sir James Graham's Merchant Seaman's Act of
eighteen 'thirty-five, which has been called the
Magna Charta of the merchant sailor, requires
that whenever any crew has been on salt
provision for ten days, lime or lemon juice and
sugar shall be served out at the daily rate of
half an ounce of each, with half a pint a week
of vinegar. This is sufficient to prevent scurvy.
Where scurvy occurs the law has been broken.
Yet the penalty has never been enforced. When
scurvy breaks out in a ship, the proportion of
the crew disabled varies from twenty to seventy
per cent, and as the owners who grudge the cost
of a little lime juice to maintain their crews in
health are the same men who economise by under-
manning their ships, the scurvy ships are those
which, of all others, have not a hand to spare,
and in a stress of weather the ship may go down
for want of hands enough to bring her to.

The proposed remedy of all this is to make
the Merchant Seaman's Act more firmly operative
than it is. At present it provides that
inspection of a ship may be obtained upon
complaint of three of the crew. But the crew about
to leave port cannot complain of the state of the
provisions which they will only find out by
experience during the voyage, and sailors are no
more apt than other untaught people—or than
many taught people—to take care that they live
wholesomely. There should be, says Dr. Barnes,
systematic inspection, as of emigrant and private
passenger ships, before sailing, and a medical
inspection of the ship's crew, of the master's
log of cases of sickness on board during the
voyage, and of the sanitary state of the ship
and remaining stores, on entering port. The
penalties for not carrying lime juice should, he
urges, be enforced; the existence of scurvy on
board should at once subject the master of a
ship to a court of inquiry, and owners and
masters of scurvy ships should be held personally
liable in damages to the sailors whose health,
their only possession, has been wantonly injured.
As for death by scurvy, it is death by a
preventable starvation. In every such case an
inquest should be held, and the responsibility
laid publicly at the right person's door. Dependence
for the prevention of scurvy should not,
of course, be exclusively upon lime juice, but
preserved meats should occasionally take the
place of salt meats, and use should be made of
preserved potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions,
celery, and mint, of pickles or sauer-kraut, and
no opportunity should be lost of getting fresh
oranges, lemons, shaddocks, or cocoa-nuts. In
case of a ship's being lost at sea, when it is
proved that there was scurvy on board, that
fact should vitiate the insurance policies.

From this preventable disease caused by
defect of nourishment, the question passes to the
deaths of men produced more or less unavoidably
by the trades in which they are said to "get their
living." There are the workers with lead, for
example. Upon these Dr. George Whitley
reports. Among the smelters life and lead are
both saved since the introduction some years
ago of very long flues in which the fumes are
condensed as they pass. Before that change
the workmen suffered from lead poisoning. The
manufacture of white lead, or carbonate of
lead, is the most dangerous sort of work upon
lead. Sheet lead is stacked in layers, each
layer placed over shallow earthen vessels
containing crude vinegar, or pyroligneous acid, and
separated by spent tan and boarding from the
layers above and below. The stack so made is
closed in, and after a few weeks unpacked by
women, when the sheets of lead are found to
have been nearly or entirely changed into
carbonate, which has only to be washed, ground
while wet, dried in ovens, and thence carried by
women to be packed in casks by men. During
the unpacking of the stacks, the carrying of the
dried powder to the casks, and, above all, in
the packing of the casks by stamping down the
powder with a beetle, lead poison flies as dust
in the air, is breathed and acts upon the system.
The common result is lead colic, easily cured,
the worst results are palsy, affections of the
brain, and gout. The Newcastle manufacturers