174 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



years' service amid the icebergs of Labrador, bis ship was ordered 

 to sail immediately for tbe West Indies. . . . He proceeded to the 

 station with a crew of one hundred and fifty men, visited almost 

 every island in the West Indies and many of the ports in the Gulf 

 of Mexico ; and, notwithstanding the transition from extreme cli- 

 mates, returned to England without the loss of a single man." He 

 adds that " every precaution was used, by lighting stoves between 

 decks and scrubbing the decks themselves with hot sand, to insure 

 the most thorough dryness." He had learned " how to do it." 

 When in command of the Recruit, off "Vera Cruz, he lost no 

 men, while the other ships anchored around him lost from twenty 

 to fifty each, and constant communication was kept up, and all 

 were exposed to the same climatic influences. Not a case of sick- 

 ness even occurred on his ship. Where he said "dryness of the 

 ship," read dryness of the house, and one great secret of house- 

 hold sanitation is learned. When the first emigrant ships went 

 to Australia, one third of the passengers died and were buried in 

 the sea ; but, through the force of sanitation applied because the 

 shippers were compelled to alter their terms, and were paid for 

 those landed alive, the death-rate was soon made smaller than 

 when the same persons were living ashore. 



Through the experience gained in the Crimean War, and large- 

 ly under the inspiration of Miss Nightingale, a systematic appli- 

 cation of better methods began to be made, in the hope of dimin- 

 ishing the awful mortality in the Indian army, and the English 

 were not slow to appropriate the garnered wisdom of other coun- 

 tries. In 1858 public attention was directed to what had been 

 called the " British Juggernaut in India." It was shown that 

 without war or famine a regiment of a thousand men dissolved 

 away at the rate of one hundred and twenty-five a year, so that 

 in eight years not a man of the original thousand remained. A 

 sanitary commission was appointed, and they investigated among 

 other things a series of distinguished preventive sanitary works, 

 in the town of Bonf aric, in Algeria. It was found that the death- 

 rates had been reduced among the military from eighty to thir- 

 teen in the thousand ; while the children, of whom it had been 

 believed, as in India, that a third generation could not be raised, 

 on account of the deadly nature of the climate, were as healthy 

 as those in the most healthy towns of France. 



Of course, sanitation under military authority can be very 

 efficiently carried out, and every fruitful idea, whether from 

 France or America, was acted on, with the result of reducing 

 the death-rate for the decade preceding 1878 to less than twenty 

 in the Indian army and twelve in the home army. In the entire 

 British army home, colonial, and Indian the saving of lives in 

 the decade under consideration was more than forty thousand. 



