PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS—SECTION H. 169 
selves to-day. We have not so much to insist upon preventability 
as to endeavour to reform rooted habits of life. Yet it may be 
suggested that the danger should have been foreseen and guarded 
against by suitable organisation, either at first or from. a very 
early date of settlement. That, however, was impossible for still 
other and all-sufficient reasons. Immigrants to a new land do 
not often comprise many of the best-instructed in the mother 
country ; but, whatever their quality, they can but bring with 
them the knowledge which was current at the time of their 
departure. Now, it is very easy to-day to speak of “ filth- 
diseases,” and to point out the certain and easy methods of 
preventing them ; but the knowledge which warrants the epithet 
now applied to them has not long been established, and, above all, 
has not long been current. It is but sixteen years since Sir John 
Simon, K.C.B., F.R.8., found it expedient to recapitulate the 
knowledge regarding their causation which had slowly accumulated 
under his direction during the preceding twenty-five years, and to 
present it ina formal report to the English Local Government 
Board, of which he was at that time the medical officer. At so 
late a date as that he found it expedient to write that remarkable 
paper, to illustrate it with notable instances, and to enforce it 
with all the arts of logic and of rhetoric ot which he is an 
acknowledged master, for guidance of the chief administrative 
body of that day in England. This was necessary in that country 
which has led and leads the world both in scientific and in 
executive sanitation, in 1874. But by that date the filth-diseases 
had already become established amongst us, and were even 
attracting our attention. 
My first object in making that quotation was not to reply to 
the opinion expressed in it. I wished to show that we have thus 
far enjoyed all the advantages and all the disadvantages of 
inheritance, in order to point out in relation to the present subject 
(to which, however, the quotation is cognate) that we labour 
under inherited disadvantages almost exclusively. We have 
inherited a law for the registration of births and deaths which 
was no sooner passed than it was seen to be defective in a most 
important respect.* And we have inherited a habit of decennial 
censuses. The decennial census has been again and again 
condemned in England—in a country where population is not 
only established, but to a large extent settled in districts and in 
towns so old as to have become fixed in those conditions of 
occupation which almost govern age-distribution. Even in such 
a country decennial enumerations, when not supplemented by 
annual rough enumerations under sex, age, Wc., have been found 
to lead to remarkable error when their results have been used 
together with deaths to gauge the sanitary condition of localities 
* The omission of penalties fiom tle original Act was in most case; supplied upon its 
acoption in Australia. 
