2 SO THE CAUSATION OF DISEASE. 



The inferior physical types found in the country are due 

 to the fact that all who are born and bred there do not enjoy 

 in perfection the several hygienic requisites just enumerated. 

 In the first place, a large number of country folk are under- 

 fed, and this undoubtedly leads to decrease in stature and 

 general physical deterioration, just as an abundant food 

 supply has the opposite effect, as our domesticated animals so 

 well show. Many country folk get little meat, and have to 

 subsist chiefly on vegetable diet. It is doubtful, however, 

 whether an ample vegetable diet is injurious, for our remote 

 ape-like ancestors were entirely vegetable feeders. Be this as 

 it may, no one can doubt that the country folk suffer much 

 from lack of sufficient food. 



In the second place, although living in the heart of the 

 country, many of the poorer folk enjoy the fresh air in only a 

 very small degree. The men, it is true, spend the greater part 

 of the twenty-four hours in the open, but the women live almost 

 entirely indoors, seldom going farther than a few steps from 

 the house, domestic duties practically compelling them to stay at 

 home during the greater part of their married life. And ' ' home * 

 — sadly misleading word — is often only another name for a 

 badly built, ill- ventilated, overcrowded hovel, where the win- 

 dows will not open and the doors will not shut, where the 

 sunlight cannot get in and the damp cannot be kept out. I 

 would not for a moment overlook the much that has been done 

 in late years by landlords and others — all honour to them — to 

 bring about improvement in these matters, but there can be 

 no doubt that the wretched insanitary condition of the cottages 

 of the peasantry in the past has largely to answer for the pre- 

 sent deterioration of many from among our country popula- 

 tion. And these unhealthy conditions are by no means 

 altogether things of the past even yet ; there are still many 

 " dark places of the earth " to be found on open hill-side, 

 breezy moorland, sea-washed coast. One particular coast 

 village that I have now in mind bears out this remark pain- 

 fully. It is not more than a year or two since I noted it. 

 Here was a community living upon the very edge of the 

 Atlantic, and if there was one spot on eartli where the air 

 might be expected to be pure and healthy, this was it. Yet I 



