546 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



essary to health and an enervated constitution, induces moral turpi- 

 tude, thus preparing the way for vice and crime. In a public calamity, 

 as the plague, cholera or yellow fever, vice and crime are always 

 much increased, and evil passions run riot in all kinds of vicious and 

 sinful excesses. 



The wealthy and refined cannot escape with impunity when the 

 physical and moral atmosphere is tainted ; they may enjoy well-ven- 

 tilated, airy apartments, with spacious grounds, isolated from the 

 poor, with a proper observance of the laws of health, yet they cannot 

 shield themselves from typhus, generated in the lanes and hovels of 

 the city, nor from the darker stain, the moral contamination which is 

 so often the outgrowth of a proximity to and familiarity with the 

 ways of moral degradation. Greece, with the loss of her liberty, and 

 the ruin of her cities, has an altered climate, dating back, perhaps, 

 from the years of the Peloponnesian war, more than 400 years before 

 the Christian era, when polished and populous Athens was devastated 

 by fire, and sword, and plagues which completed her downfall. 



In the middle of the sixteenth century London had an estimated 

 population of 500,000, and the average duration of life was twenty-five 

 years, Her streets were narrow, scarcely paved ; imperfectly con- 

 structed sewers, as receptacles of all manner of filth ; dwellings, mostly 

 of wood, were overcrowded, and no attention was given to their venti- 

 lation ; water poorly supplied, and cleanliness was neither encouraged 

 nor enforced. In a. d. 1665, 3000 people perished from the plague 

 in a single night. From 1665 to 1679, the mortality from that source 

 alone reached the enormous figure of 100,000. Let us contrast that 

 with her improved sanitation, her stupendous sewers, completed at a 

 cost of $20,000,000, and her population increased to millions, with the 

 rate of mortality changed from fifty to twenty- four in 1000. 



Calcutta was built in a swamp a few miles east of the river Hoogly, 

 .and surrounded by lakes whose water-supply was furnished from over- 

 flows of the river. By careful and proper drainage this city has be- 

 come as healthy as any of the same latitude on earth. On the contrary, 

 Stockholm, situated on an island at the entrance of Lake Malar, pos- 

 sessing all the requisite natural advantages of one of the healthiest 

 cities in Europe, is, because of a gross disregard of sanitary laws, with 

 imperfect drainage and bad water-supply, one of the unhealthiest in 

 that quarter of the globe. 



Sanitary science, of a necessity, must become a part of our political 

 economy, receiving encouragement from the statesman as well as the 

 philanthropist. We are daily made cognizant of the fact that every 

 state in this Union must recognize the beneficial effects of sanitary 

 laws. The tyrannical law of necessity must no longer subject the 



