AGES MOST SUITABLE FOR RECRUITS. 



259 



We have often thought that officers employed in enhst- 

 in<r soldiers for the honourable company did not always sut- 

 fidentlv consider what is the most proper period of lite to 

 prefer "in recruits : for, although a young man of seventeen, 

 weU-grown and healthy, may, in his own country, easily 

 enough bear the heat of the dog-days, the fatigue of a long 

 march, and the pains of hunger and thirst ; yet it does not 

 follow that he will be fit for the same hard ser%-ice in a hot 

 cUmate. In India the scorching winds at one season, and 

 the damps at others, with the peculiar ills which they never 

 fail to bring along with them, are tryuig enough to the 

 most robust and best inured ; how much more so must they 

 be to the juvenile and perhaps delicate frame which has not 



attained the vigour of manhood ! P'^""g,J^^^°"f. f„t!; 

 dence in India! the writer frequently saw the injudicious 

 practice of too earlv enlisting for the tomd zone prove 

 fatal to striplings, who, had they been permitted to remain 

 but three years longer in Britain, might have grovNTi up into 

 hardy men, able to endure the severities and vicissitudes 

 of any chmatc in the world. It is difficuh, mdeed, to con- 

 ceive a more helpless or miserable being than a raw lad, 

 durina his first severe indisposition in that country, when 

 he begins most sincerely to regret the want of his family 

 and friends. The glow of health and the vivacity of 

 youth, it is true, are for a time rendered more vivid and 

 buoyant by the brilliant sunshine and exhilarating air ot an 

 -Asiatic clime ; but no sooner do disease and languor assail 

 an individual so circumstanced than the fair illusion van- 

 ishes : he looks around, but sees no well-known face to 

 cheer him • he finds himself desolate and abandoned, and 

 not rarely sinks into that degree of mental depression 

 which is of all states the most likely to aggravate bodily 

 complaint. Such is one great evil that arises from enlist- 

 in<r recruits for Eastern service before their constitutions 

 are ftiUy formed ; an evil the extent of which maj- be judged 

 of from its results in a single regiment. Sir George bal- 

 lin<rall, in his excellent Practical Observations on t ever, 

 Dysentery, &c., page 13, mentions, that; "from an inspec- 

 tion of the tables exhibiting an abstract of the register of 

 deaths in the second battalion of the Royals, it will appear, 

 that durincr the first year of the regiment bemg in India, 



