BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1285 



moderate planning skill, in any moderate-sized town, often to save 

 thousands, up to many tens and hundreds of thousands in larger 

 cities, and even to millions in a metropolitan one — thus more tens 

 of millions in the national aggregate than the reader could readily 

 believe, till he has some of their plannings and their re-plannings, 

 — the conventionally wasteful and the revised — clearly set before 

 him. Is it asked — how does one know this? — or — what has this to 

 do with science? — the united answer is plain — that of the best part 

 of a lifetime's experience of such work, and this directly inspired 

 by the "conservative surgery" of the hospital, and its own cleansing; 

 so thus readily extended to cities by dozens, and from cold temperate 

 to tropic lands. 



Yet another example of how our existing scientific and technical 

 knowledge of hygiene and of civics as yet fail adequately to reach 

 either their public or its authorities, is manifest in France. For 

 while the Pasteur Institute of Paris still keeps worthy of its great 

 initiative and history, France, and even Paris itself, still remain to 

 an astonishing degree immune to its ideas— their few experts apart; 

 and these still failing to re-educate their town or city; and least of 

 all the villages, which still outnumber all. The terror of a courant 

 d'air still prevails : so what University or other public building, let 

 alone tenement house, or even railway compartment, is yet properly 

 ventilated of its air-sewage? So tuberculosis has victims beyond 

 our industrial world; and the like for other dirt-diseases, enteric, 

 and so on. In short, it is not the low birth-rate (to which all other 

 nations are also coming, indeed often have practically come), but 

 the high death-rate, which is the bane and shame of France as 

 compared with other peoples, albeit none are so advanced as they 

 should be. How explain all this backwardness? Largely, of course, 

 by lack of biological and hygienic education. Again, there were till 

 lately only too many places in Italy, — and doubtless still some — 

 where in common prudence one must close the windows at night, 

 not because "night air" (so long dreaded among ourselves, too) is 

 itself in any way bad air, but "mal-aria", understood only since 

 Ronald Ross's work, never yet adequately popularised — means only 

 the best time for the mosquito, be she fever-laden or no. Hence the 

 urgent need of re-education ; and this from the biologic, hygienic, 

 and biotechnic viewpoint— as yet substantialh^ outside both the 

 rival camps of classical or so-called modern education ; for be this 

 so far scientific and technical, it remains mathematico-physical and 

 chemical all but exclusively: education is not yet biosocial. Here it 

 is but fair, as well as helpful and hopeful, to point to such smaU 

 beginnings of living nature-knowledge and application as we have 

 here and there in Britain, and of course in France too, and now 

 more widely in the United States, though even there as yet far from 

 enough. 



