202 GLIMPSES OF NATURE. 



surroundings are concerned ; and it is precisely these 

 conditions which are not typically represented in our 

 great centres. 



As to house accommodation, it is only of late years 

 we have been awaking to the ideas that it is nothing 

 short of disgraceful to permit cellar-dwellings and 

 dilapidated tenements to be inhabited at all ; and that 

 to screw out of the poor of the slums an extortionate 

 rent for houses compared with which an ordinary 

 pig-stye is cleanly and sanitary, is an extortionate, 

 unjust, and crying evil. 



The fact is that, the moment we have to deal with 

 masses of human beings, aggregated together in cities, 

 and living under conditions which violate every rule 

 of health, we come upon causes of physical degenera- 

 tion which are too evident to admit of theoretical 

 modification, far less denial. An author has taken 

 the trouble to total up for us the number of persons 

 engaged in some half-dozen sedentary occupations in 

 London in 1881. We find his figures to give us: 

 indoor domestic servants, 258,709; general labourers, 

 78,115 ; milliners, &c., 71,837 ; clerks, 60,605 > tailors, 

 41,221 ; and carpenters, 38,143. Thus, out of some 

 548,000 persons, about four-fifths lead an indoor life, 

 and, of these, two-fifths (or 173,000) follow purely 

 sedentary trades. 



What sedentary life means to the units which follow 

 it closely most of us may know. It implies the want 

 of the first essential for healthy life pure air and it 

 includes yet another condition of vitality free and 

 open-air exercise. Deterioration of frame in the one 

 generation, we have also to note, is transmitted with 

 tenfold force to the next. As health is cumulative in 

 its effects, so also are disease and degeneracy ; so that 



