1879.] 
Its Present and its Future. 
53 
excellence are due, and which should be universally copied : 
1st. That of issuing burial permits only after registry has 
been made by a properly qualified person ; 2nd. The returns 
are made to an expert, who collates them in accordance 
with the views of the most eminent authorities, and draws 
from them their most important teachings of immediate 
and very practical application. 
II. Registration of Disease. 
We must not rest content, however, with the returns of 
mortality ; we should advance to the registration of disease. 
This is practicable, and if not in all, yet in that large class 
of diseases in their nature preventable, of universally 
acknowledged utility. We do not delay until a street brawl 
becomes a riot before notifying the magistrate and securing 
police aid; neither should we wait until diphtheria, typhoid, 
&c., become epidemic before sending intelligence to the 
custodians of the public health. But this is not all ; to 
make their knowledge of public utility, these custodians 
must be invested with adequate powers. At present there 
is little more expended upon the whole work of the Board of 
Health of the State of New Jersey during an entire year 
than the pay of two policemen. Its members labour without 
remuneration for the sanilas publica. Their power is mainly 
the educational impetus of just ideas, forcibly expressed. 
There are many ways of promoting sanitary reforms, but 
none, it appears to me, so practical as that of giving to the 
Health Board the money, means, and men to register 
diseases, to investigate their causes, to suggest and promote 
their remedies, and not unfrequently to bring offenders to 
suitable punishment. 
III. State Sanitary Legislation. 
There is a source of danger, as this last summer has 
strikingly shown, which cannot be warded off by sanitary 
legislation when limited to a few of the States. If those 
States which are the seats of yellow fever year after year do 
not provide efficient precautions to suppress or control the 
epidemic, it will annually invade other localities, following 
the lines of travel, and 'spreading northward in the Missis- 
sippi basin. We have recently seen the alacrity with which 
more favoured communities came to the relief of those 
afflicted with the epidemic. Help of every description was 
sent until the bountiful public was asked to hold its hand. 
