MODERN IDEAS OF SANITABY ECONOMY. 



41 



the same man would seek his highest honour in surrounding 

 himself with all the complex devices and refined ornaments 

 which are the products of civilization and of peace. And 

 although it has been sufficiently shown that a rough, semi- 

 savage life is not productive on the whole of a longer average 

 life, but on the contrary of a shorter, it requires at least 

 no tours to Scotland, Ireland, or Wales for health, and no 

 infirmary life by the sea shore. With them there is no saving 

 of the tender life, no nursing of the weak child into the 

 healthy man, but a rapid death for him who is seized with 

 illness, whilst violence and excitement remove from him many 

 of those smaller evils to which in a calmer life men are liable. 

 The whole community seems to feel the advantage of the 

 change, the farther men remove from the hubit of leaving 

 the sick behind, and of killing those who are slow on their 

 march ; and in the sympathies which suggest this change, and 

 the circumstances which bring leisure for their growth, we 

 probably find the first rude spot where the natural history of 

 sanitary economy begins. 



Looking also at the history of the subject in our own 

 country, and what little I may know of ancient countries or 

 distant ones, it would seem as if the attention to health arose, 

 not so much from any sense of sanitary or of healing mea- 

 sures, as from the simple natural desire of the sick to obtain 

 more comfort of place, whilst the more extended part of the 

 question arose from the desire of appearance and the natural 

 tendency in certain stages of civilization to heap up luxuries ; 

 these luxuries being, however, the abuse of instincts evidently 

 tending, to a considerable extent, in a natural and desirable 

 direction. Every virtue is said to have its companion vice ; 

 and when a proud king of Nineveh builds a palace for his 

 own vanity, at the expense, no doubt, of much misery, it is 

 not from any keen perception of natural laws that he makes 

 the rooms larger than his predecessors did, — that he puts glass 

 in them, (if indeed that is a glass furnace which is found in 



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