AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 26 9 



streets has not been sufficiently attended to, and is, in the greatest degree 

 anti-social. The wretched homes generally correspond with the streets, 

 and when the man returns from his labor, exhausted, and requires refresh- 

 ment and quiet, he finds discomfort, squalor, and filth around him, and gets 

 away from it as fast as possible, to spend his hard earned wages in selfish 

 gratifications. 



The neglect of the decencies of life invariably debases the human mind, 

 to the same extent that hopeless want produces recklessness. The power 

 of the poor of obtaining bread, and maintaining their progeny, is much 

 diminished by the neglect of the city authorities to drain, sewer, and 

 cleanse the localities they are forced to inhabit. It has been taught, by 

 large experience, that there are certain epochs of life, that three-quarters 

 of the persons who die at those epochs, die of acute fevers, to which 

 humunity is subject at the period which intervenes after the dangers of 

 infancy and childhood have been passed, or between puberty and old age. 

 This precious term of life may be extended almost indefinitely, by human 

 wisdom and precaution, because it arises from the dirty state of the streets, 

 and the forlorn condition of the houses in which they reside ; sewage, ven- 

 tilation and cleanliness being unknown, pernicious poison is unceasingly 

 generated in such quantities as to predispose the systems of the inhabitants 

 to fatal maladies, by the decomposition of vegetable and animal matters, 

 which always exist where many persons are congregated together. Remove 

 these to the rural districts before putrefaction commences, and they will 

 fit the soil for the reception and germination of seed, and become not only 

 a primary, but fundamental means of preventing the production of fever. 

 It may not be generally known, but even so far back as 1845, thirty-four 

 thousand of our population lived in alleys and cellars, of which number 

 seven thousand occupied damp, cold, underground apartments, and most of 

 them were afflicted with contagious affections of the skin, rheumatism and 

 other inflammatory diseases, and all of them with more or less fever, in- 

 duced by the nauseous effluvium arising from their dirty condition, and the 

 want of pure unrespired air; half of the children of these wretched people 

 die before they reach the fifth year, and the mean age of death does not 

 exceed twenty years. 



The means of remedying these evils arc simple : First, by employing 

 the labor of scavengers, for bulky matter ; second, by the use of drains, 

 with a full supply of water, to carry off comminuted solids ; and thirdly, 

 ventilation for serial matters. Attention to these simple rules will annihi- 

 late the sad influences which now debilitate constitutions, cause epidemics, 

 and drive thousands of citizens to hospitals and death, besides afi'ording 

 those matters so necessary for fitting the soil to receive and germinate 

 seeds. 



The formation of all soils for this purpose may be traced, without much 

 difficulty, to the disintegration of rocks, by chemical and mechanical agen- 

 cies, that contain alkaline earths and alkalies. Yellow clay is undoubtely 

 formed from granite, blue clay from greenstone and sieuite, other clays by 



