No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 443 



The absoiu'o of a proper system of State? I'egistration of vital sta- 

 tistics in tiiis State, is at once a misfortune and a dis}j;race; a mis- 

 foitune because it leaves us witliout any reliable mea-iis of knowing 

 what the comparative moitalily and pievaleuce of disease has been 

 in diti'ereut parts of the State in any one year, or in the whole State 

 for successive years, and because it allows e})idemics to get headway 

 before they are reported to the central auihority, and this leads to 

 much avoidable suffering and loss of life; a disgrace because Penn- 

 sylvania is pointed at with the linger of scor^i by sister States, as a 

 laggard in the great march of civilization, for the lack of it. 



Am I wrong in asserting that the condition is near akin to bar- 

 barism in which a human being, anj- one of you, for instance, men 

 of high standiiig in your respective communities, if 3011 do not hap- 

 pen to live within the limits of an incorporated borough or city, may, 

 whe4» his useful life has terminated, be put under the ground with 

 no more legal or official recognition or record of the fact than if you 

 were a dog? Is it any wonder that grave-yard insurance has flour- 

 ished in Pennsylvania, when such laxity prevails? lo New York, 

 New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, in fact in almost any other enlightened 

 Commonwealth, it would be possible for the central health authority 

 to present exact flgures showing how' many deaths take place from 

 ty[)hoid in a year, and what proportion of these take place in the 

 country and \\ hat proportion in the city. As it is, I can only say that 

 the number of instances in which the State Board of Health is ap- 

 pealed to for aid and advice in checking the spread of typhoid in the 

 rural districts has convinced its members of the truth of the asser- 

 tion just made. During the past fall, in one little village of 1,200 

 inhabitants, withiw the short space of two months, 167 cases of this 

 disease occurred with 10 deaths. Little note was taken of this by 

 the public at large because there were only IG deaths. But suppose 

 that the fever had prevailed iu the city of Philadelphia to the same 

 extent with the same mortality rate in proportion to population, 

 and we should have had 180,::).j1 cases and 1(5,241) deaths, the whole 

 civilized w^orld would have thrilled with horror at the thought of so 

 terrible a scourge and Philadelphia would have been shunned as a 

 veritable pest hole. If the fact be admitted that typhoid fever is a 

 not infrequent visitant at the farm house and in the village, how 

 shall we account for it? Simply by the otlier fact that with long 

 use and increasing density of population, the wells, springs and 

 streams of the entire State are becoming polluted, for in ninety-nine 

 cases out of a hundred, tyi)hoid can be traced to polluted water as its 

 ultimate cause. 



I know well that here I am treading u^ron dangerous ground 

 and hazarding indignant criticism. No one tradition does the aver- 

 age farmer guard with greater jealousy than the reputation of 



