ADDRESS. cili 
lation—last full ten years, or probably one-third longer, in the wilderness 
of this world. 
In our time physicians have ably exerted themselves in aid of the sanitary 
engineer and administrator. Their general sentiments have been long ex- 
pressed in such terms as those of Dr. Willis of Kelso :— It is impossible to 
avoid the conclusion that much more might still be accomplished could we 
be induced to profit by a gradually extending knowledge, so as to found 
upon it a more wisely directed practice. When man shall be brought to 
acknowledge (as truth must finally constrain him to acknowledge) that it is 
by his own hand, through his neglect of a few obvious rules, that the seeds 
of disease are most lavishly sown within his frame, and diffused over com- 
- munities; when he shall have required of medical science to occupy itself 
rvather with the prevention of maladies than with their cure; when govern- 
ments shall be induced to consider the preservation of a nation’s health an 
object as important as the promotion of its commerce or the maintenance of 
its conquests, we may hope then to see the approach of those times when, 
after a life spent almost without sickness, we shall close the term of an un- 
harassed existence by a peaceful euthanasia.” 
It is to the landlord,—to the representative landlords and owners of habi- 
tations,—in parliament, to whom exhortations are now required to be 
addressed, to raise their minds above “the sordid considerations ” of the ex- 
penses of cure, that is, of the expenses of those sanitary works of combined 
drainage and water-supply, which it is their province to provide. 
It is right, however, to state that advances in well-directed practical ap- 
plications of sanitary science are advances in economy ; that two houses and 
two towns may receive constant supplies of water at the expense formerly 
incurred for supplying one on the intermittent system, with its stagnancy and 
pollutions in house cisterns and large storage reservoirs. It remains for the 
legislature and local administrations to make prevalent that which is proved 
to be practicable for the public good, and to ensure that good at the econo- 
mical rate at which particular instances afford demonstrations that it is 
achievable. 
Agriculture has of late years made unusual progress in this country, and 
much of that progress is due to the application of scientific principles ; chiefly 
of those supplied by chemistry, in a less degree of zoology and physiology : 
some minor help in regard to the more effectual abatement of noxious insects 
has been had from entomology ; recent discoveries of the metamorphoses, 
metagenesis, and the course and modes of transmission of internal parasites, 
have afforded a rational explanation of some traditional precautionary rules 
of herdsmen, in reference to the ‘ rot’ in sheep, from fluke-worms and hydatids ; 
and more direct power of preventing epizootics will doubtless be obtained 
from entozoology. 
Geology now teaches the precise nature and relations of soils, a knowledge 
of great practical importance in guiding the drainer of land in the modifi- 
