462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



riding-regulations, which entail ruptures on the soldiers, and against 

 " our ridiculous drill-book," as independent officers are now agreeing to 

 call it. Even limiting ourselves to sanitary administration in the 

 army, the files of our journals and the reports of our commissions 

 would yield multitudinous instances of scarcely credible bungling 

 as in bad barrack arrangements, of which we heard so much a few 

 years ago ; as in an absurd style of dress, such as that which led to 

 the wholesale cutting-down of the Twelfth Cameronians when they 

 arrived in China in 1841 ; as in the carelessness which lately caused the 

 immense mortality by cholera among the Eighteenth Hussars at Se- 

 cunderabad. Or, not further to multiply instances, take the long- 

 continued ignoring of ipecacuanha as a specific for dysentery, which 

 causes so much mortality in our Indian service : 



" It is a singular fact that the introducers of the ipecacuanha into European 

 practice, the Brazilian traveller Marcgrav, and the physician Piso (in 1648), 

 explicitly stated that the powder is a specific cure for dysentery, in doses of a 

 drachm and upward; but that this information appears never to have been 

 acted upon till 1813, when Surgeon G. Playfair, of tbe East Indian Company's 

 service, wrote testifying to its use in these doses. Again, in 1831, a number of 

 reports of medical officers were published by the Madras Medical Board, show- 

 ing its great effects in hourly doses of five grains, till frequently 100 grains were 

 given in a short period; testimony which, notwithstanding its weight, was 

 doomed to be similarly overlooked, till quite recently, when it has been again 

 brought directly under the notice of the Indian Government, which is making 

 very vigorous efforts to introduce the culture of the plant into suitable districts 

 of India." 1 



So that, notwithstanding the gravity of the evil, and the pressing 

 need for this remedy from time to time thrust on the attention of the 

 Indian authorities, nearly sixty years passed before the requisite steps 

 were taken. 2 



That the State, which fails to secure the health of men, even in its 

 own employ, should fail to secure the health of beasts, might perhaps 

 be taken as self-evident ; though possibly some, comparing the money 

 laid out on stables with the money laid out on cottages, might doubt 

 the corollary. Be this as it may, however, the recent history of cattle- 

 diseases and of legislation to prevent cattle-diseases yields the same 



1 " Report on the Progress and Condition of the Royal Gardens at Kew, 1870," p. 5. 



8 My attention was drawn to this case by one who has had experience in various 

 government services ; and he ascribed this obstructiveness in the medical service to the 

 putting of young surgeons under old. The remark is significant, and has far-reaching 

 implications. Putting young officials under old is a rule of all services civil, military, 

 naval, or other ; and, in all services, necessarily has the effect of placing the advanced 

 ideas and wider knowledge of a new generation under control by the ignorance and 

 bigotry of a generation to which change has become repugnant. This, which is a 

 seemingly ineradicable vice of public organizations, is a vice to which private organiza- 

 tions are far lesa liable ; since, in the life-and-death struggle of competition, merit, even 

 if young, takes the place of demerit, even if old. 



