hom you can put confidence. Dr. COLLINS
makes the following statement:--

When his predecessor, Dr. JOSEPH CLARKE, was in office, in the year
1784, he found that seventeen children in the hundred, nearly one in
six, died within the first fortnight after birth, nineteen-twentieths of
these of one particular disease peculiar to very early infancy. Looking
for the cause of this frightful mortality, he thought he found it in a
foul and vitiated state of the air of the hospital. So he had some
openings of considerable size made in the ceiling of each ward, and
three holes, of an inch in diameter, through each window at top: the
doors, too, were perforated with numerous holes. In this way, a free
circulation was secured, and so arranged, that the nurses could not
control it; for some of the old-fashioned nurses would not have opened a
window in the Black Hole at Calcutta, for fear the inmates should catch
a cold.

What was the result of this simple proceeding? Why, the mortality fell,
from seventeen in a hundred, down to between five and six; and Dr.
Collins gives us the result up to his time in these words, "Thus, by his
valuable suggestions, 16,371 lives have been saved, as, had the
mortality of infants continued one in six to this day (1833), the number
of children dying of the 131,227 (which is the total number born in the
hospital) would be 21,871, as the hospital registry now shows." In the
battle of Waterloo, the British and their allies lost 16,186 men; that
is, 185 less than the great army of very light infantry saved from death
by letting out the smoke of the battle of life, and letting in the sweet
air of heaven, through the walls of the Dublin hospital.

So much for what air alone can do for children. Now, it is not the
"nine-day fits" of that hospital in its unventilated condition which
kills our poor children in the hot months, but that other disease of
infancy, which to name is like sounding a funeral knell in the ears of
many a parent. This one malady, more than any other, gives Boston its
place on the black list of unhealthy towns. All parents having young
children leave the city during the worst part of the sickly season, if
they have the means of so doing. Our best streets look as DEFOE tells us
London streets looked during the Great Plague. But thousands of families
must remain; and we are bound to do what we can for them in their
dearest interests,--the lives of their children.

With regard to cholera