608 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



together of human beings into great cities brings numerous diseases, both to infan- 

 tile and adult life. In fact, these maladies, such as diphtheria, measles, scarlet- 

 fever and small-pox, have threatened at times to destroy great municipalities. 



The overheating in the summer season and the ill-ventilation of residences 

 decimate cities of their infantile population. Commerce, too, is a constant men- 

 ace to mankind, because it brings not only an interchange of products, but also 

 an exchange of diseases. 



The ships which come from the Ganges and the Nile to the Occident, laden 

 with their rich cargoes, bring with them pestilential cholera ; and vessels which 

 sail from tropical ports laden with coffee, sugars, and fruits, bring with them 

 the seeds of tropical fevers ; and thus there is a bitter for every sweet, and an 

 enemy skulking in ambush for every friend. It is the mission of sanitary science 

 to give success and permanancy to our modern civilization in every land and in 

 every clime ; in a word, to protect the growth and insure the success of great 

 cities. This has been effected for many great cities. The city of London, for 

 example, contains a population equal to that of New York, Paris, and Berlin put 

 together, and yet has a lower death rate than either one of these cities. Sanitary 

 science constitutes a broad and inexhaustible field for human investigation. ~ 



It includes a large scope for jurisprudence for law making, international, 

 national, state and municipal. In some countries, sanitary legislation has re- 

 ceived a study equal to its importance, and in some parts of the United States, 

 particularly in the State of Massachusetts, it has become an elaborate and useful 

 code, both State and municipal. Practical sanitary science includes the profession 

 of the architect as to heating and ventilation, the sanitary engineer or sewer 

 builder, the plumber, and the chemist, who devotes himself to the study of foods 

 and the prevention of the crime of food adulteration. Here let me digress for a 

 moment and point out the fact that the adulteration of foods is the greatest and 

 besetting crime of the age, and of this country and of this State in particular — 

 that substance only, which is not adulterated, is that article which is cheaper than 

 any adulterant. 



Coffee, tea, sugar, molasses, candies, honey, butter, lard, oil, liquors of every 

 description, drugs of every kind, all are adulterated, and no legislature, no State 

 board of health brings the miscreants to justice. Again, sanitary science includes 

 the physician who studies the nature and history of pestilential diseases and their 

 prevention. It includes the labor of the practical health officer, who enforces 

 proper regulations for municipal cleanliness ; for sanitary science, when reduced 

 to first principles, to its quintessence, is cleanliness. The architect's endeavor ta 

 secure proper ventilation of the home is but an effort at cleanliness. The sewer 

 is an adjunct for cleanliness, and the pipes for house drainage and water-service 

 put in by the plumber are means for reaching the same end. 



Sanitary science is the enemy, the antipode, of Malthusianism. It endeavors 

 to prolong life, to save life, to fight oif death. It teaches that society has an in- 

 terest in the preservation of every human life, a social, a moneyed, a material 

 interest in the protection and prolongation of every human existence. It assumes 



