ody which
they offer to all,--it seems almost needless to speak from the medical
point of view; for all know what cities would be without open areas,
where children can play in the shade, and old people warm themselves in
the sun. I wish to call your attention to a single point intimately
connected with the alarming fact of the excessive death-rate of which I
have spoken. That point is the influence of the air they breathe on the
health of children, with the bearing of this on the question before us.

If a child is found to have been starved to death in a cellar or an
attic, a cry of horror is raised over it. If two or three wandering
boys, as it happened the other day at Lowell, come upon some noxious
roots, and, in obedience to their omnivorous instinct, devour them, and
pay the forfeit, the whole country hears of it. If a family or two get
hold of some ill-conditioned meat, and suffer for it, the groans of
their colics are echoed all over the land. If a milkman misrepresents
his honest cows by falsifying their product, the chemist detects him,
and the press puts him in the pillory. If the Cochituate or Mystic water
is too much like an obsolete chowder, up go all noses, and out come all
manner of newspaper paragraphs from "Senex," "Tax-payer," and the rest.
But air-poisoning kills a hundred where food-poisoning kills one. Let me
relate a circumstance which happened in Ireland, to which circumstance,
in all probability, I owe the pleasure of being listened to at this
moment by some among our hard-working, adopted citizens who are before
me.

When I say to you, meaning to speak the words of sober truth, that a
single physician, by a single and simple measure, saved more lives than
were lost at Waterloo by the British army and all its allies, leaving
out the Prussians, you will suspect me of exaggeration, not very
uncommon in public speakers. I will therefore intrench myself behind
certain details which I have often before cited, but not in the presence
of a gathering of this kind.

Dr. ROBERT COLLINS was Master, as it is called, of the great Dublin
Lying-in Hospital, where the annual rate of births was between two and
three thousand, from the year 1826 to 1833. A work of his, containing
the results of his practice during his seven years of service, was
published in Boston in 1841, by order of the Massachusetts Medical
Society, for the use of its members. I consider him vouched for as
authority, therefore, by men in w