PART v. MADEIRA POETIC. 63 



of every kind grow rapidly, and the food of a stalwart 

 people is rapidly raised. But let the hitherto intractable 

 western coasts, such as the Swan River Settlement of 

 one, or Walvisch Bay and Namaqualand of the other, 

 be rather utilised as grand sanitaria for the Masonian 

 variety of consumptive patients; and if it be true that 

 70,000 lives are lost every year in Great Britain from 

 her dread disease consumption, what a field is presented 

 to the statesman to plan for, and to the philanthropist 

 to work in. 



For remember that nineteen out of every twenty of 

 those consumptive victims are cut off in the very prime 

 of their lives, just as their full education for fitting them 

 to play a useful part to the community they had been 

 brought up in, is finished ; and when their returns of 

 gratitude, genius, and patriotism with excusable ambi- 

 tion, were about to begin ; and each one of the poor 

 young fellows, now so prematurely doomed to die, and of 

 whom I saw so many in Madeira, did invariably appear 

 the most high-souled, most intellectual, almost saintly, 

 martyr-like, and most beautifully idealled existency I 

 had ever come across. 



We have already, in Madeira's science walks, seen 

 Dr. Mason nobly sacrificing himself, at twenty-seven 

 years of age, for the prospective meteorologic and medical 

 benefit of others ; and in the paths of literature in the 

 same place the early deceased Terence M. Hughes was 

 an equally meritorious though peaceful hero, laboriously 



