132 GLArcus ; or, 



had begotten, and drank in, day by day, the 

 poisoned atmosphere, and formed it into iiiir 

 green leaves, and breathed into the children's 

 faces from every pore, whenever they bent over 

 it, the life-giving oxygen for "which their dulled 

 blood and festered lungs were craving in vain ; 

 fulfilling God's will itself, though man would 

 not, too careless or too covetous to see, after six 

 thousand years of boasted progress, why God 

 had covered the earth with grass, herb, and tree, 

 a living and life-giving garment of perpetual 

 health and youth. 



It is too sad to think long about, lest wc 

 become very Ileraclituses. Let us take the 

 other side of the matter with Democritus, try 

 to laugh man out of a little of his boastful 

 ignorance and self-satisfied clumsiness, and tell 

 him, that if the House of Commons would but 

 summon one of the little Paramecia from any 

 Thames sewer-mouth, to give his evidence before 

 their next Cholera Committee, sanatory blue- 

 books, invaluable as they are, would be super- 

 seded for ever and a day, and Sir William 

 Molesworth would no longer have to confess, 

 as he did last year, that he knew of no means 

 of stopping the smells which were driving the 



