XcVill REPORT—1858. 
evidence of the miserable results of its neglect, we must be stimulated to use 
every effort to promote its progress and impress its importance on all who 
may aid therein. 
Long after Lord Bacon’s day, the plague, the fever of the ‘black assize,’ 
and the like visitations, which drove Courts and Parliaments and Royal 
Societies from town to country, were met only by rude quarantine imprison- 
ments of the sick, which greatly aggravated the sum of mortality. Acci- 
dents, such as the fire of London, subliming much old and vested filth, and 
followed by wider streets and better dwellings, produced results which 
opened the eyes of a few thinkers to the relation between certain physical 
conditions and the non-return of the plague. 
Now, however, these relations have been comprehensively investigated ; the 
diseases produced or aggravated by preventible conditions are well known ; 
the most efficient and economical modes of prevention have been the subject 
of successful and convincing experiment. But men are slow to act where 
the profitable result is not direct. Health, we call, with cuckoo-ery, the 
greatest blessing ; but practically it is daily sacrificed to ambition, wealth, 
pleasure, and a hundred aims in which duty takes no necessary part. That, 
however, is an affair of individual free-will with which abstract science has 
no business. 
But in reference to inevitable aggregates of mankind, the nation is con- 
cerned in the science which seeks their especial bodily well-being. Fleets, 
armies, manufactories, workshops, the localities in towns where wage-people* 
congregate,—such are conditions of citizens in which it behoves the State, 
to the utmost constitutional extent of its power, to apply the ascertained 
means of preventing disease and death. 
Perhaps the most exemplary instances of the value and economy of 
sanitary science are afforded by the records of the British Navy, especially 
since the period of Capt. Cook, whose name, were I to select one, as a prime 
promoter of the science, would be that which I should adduce with highest 
veneration. Some of the Arctic Expeditions, also, illustrate in an exemplary 
degree the value of preventive measures in maintaining health under difficult 
and depressing circumstances. 
Our armies have yet to receive the benefit of what is now known in the 
prevention of death by disease. To what extent they have to benefit by it 
has been made plain by the results of recent investigations, in which 
the testimony of FLorence NIGHTINGALE shines forth as the beacon which 
lights to better measures. 
* J venture to propose this term as free from the objections that have been made to 
“ lower orders,” ‘‘ humbler classes,” “‘ poorer classes,’”’ “‘ working classes,” ‘‘ labouring popu- 
lation,” &c. The two former are a reflection on those who are so designated; and the two 
latter are an implied reflection on all other classes, as if left to a life of vacant inoceupation. 
They are injuriously misleading terms. The true specific character of the great class in 
question is seen by the Naturalist to be “ payment by wages”; it is the “ wage-class.” 
