HEALTH AND DISEASE. 273 



charities, or brought up in work-hourses, where the air 

 was rendered impure by numbers, and where little atten- 

 tion appears to have been paid, either to food, or nursing, 

 not above one in twenty formerly lived to see the second 

 year ; so that out of 2800, so received, 2690 died yearly. 

 But when the conditions of health came, by experience, 

 to be better understood, and an act of Parliament ob- 

 tained obliging the parish officers to send these little inno- 

 cents to be nursed in the country, this frightful mortality 

 was reduced to 450, instead of 2600, out of 2800. 



867. Can evidence stronger than this be required to 

 prove that disease, and death frequently arise from causes 

 which man is able to discover and remove ; and is it not 

 therefore his imperious duty to investigate and avoid such 

 causes, by every means which Providence has placed 

 within his reach ? 



868. The different rates of mortality in crowded cities, 

 and in country villages, very clearly demonstrate the in- 

 fluence of impure air, and improper, or damaged food, in 

 abridging human life. Even in the most civilized life, 

 and the best managed communities, so great is the num- 

 ber who are doomed to find an early grave, and so few 

 die of the decay of nature, that we may well suppose 

 that we have not, with all the philosophy and humanity 

 of the present age, yet arrived at the maximum of health, 

 and longevity ; but the advance already made in the art 

 of procuring long life, gives every reason to believe, that 

 perseverance, and the extension of knowledge with re- 

 gard to the causes of disease, will, even for centuries to 

 come, enable man to extend more and more, the comforts 

 and the lives of the human family. 



869. The progress of knowledge, and the increasing 

 ascendency of reason, have already delivered us from 

 many scourges which were regarded by the ancients as 

 the unavoidable dispensations of Providence. In the days 

 of imperial Rome, that capital, and her territories, were 

 frequently almost depopulated by visitations of the plague 

 and other pestilences, from which the present generation 

 is, by a stricter observance of the conditions of health, 

 entirely exempted. 



870. In London, in like mariner, the same contempt for 

 cleanliness, ventilation, and comfort, which produced such 



