ought to be intelligible to fathers and mothers of every class,
from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of convincing some of
them at least that the science of health, now so utterly neglected
in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be taught--the
rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and
university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were
hardy, just as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the
hardy lived. They may have been able to say of themselves--as
they do in a State paper of 1515, now well known through the pages
of Mr. Froude: "What comyn folk of all the world may compare with
the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and
all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and so strong in
the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been fed on
"great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini
calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in
numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of
natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest,"
cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by
infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and
left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to
perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first
years of this century, steam and commerce produced an enormous
increase in the population. Millions of fresh human beings found
employment, married, brought up children who found employment in
their turn, and learnt to live more or less civilised lives. An
event, doubtless, for which God is to be thanked. A quite new