duration of human life in Great Britain advance from thirty
years (which it was half a century ago) to forty-nine years (which it
is now, according to life tables), why may we not witness a still
further advance? Why should seventy or eighty years remain as the
usual limit of human life? Why should its natural duration under
perfectly healthy surrounding conditions not be at least 100 years,
with an occasional extension of some ten or fifteen years more?"

"When people are made to understand that at least nine-tenths of the
deaths in England are premature, the representatives of the most
parsimonious rate payers will be compelled by the criticism of the
public to remember that they also represent the more sacred interests
of human life and happiness, and that resistance to sanitary
improvements is punished by preventable disease and premature death.
High local mortality is largely due to want of local information. For
the tens or hundreds who are killed by murder or manslaughter, or by
accident, or in battles on land or sea, thousands and millions are
victims of preventable disease. When this is fully understood, no
imperial Government, no local authority, will dare to incur the
responsibility of such a national disgrace."

Dr. Wells then forcibly illustrated the dangerous and pestilential
results of our system of burying the dead, planting the germs of
diseases in the ground to come forth again, and corrupting the water
supply. London alone uses 2,200 acres of land for cemeteries, and
England and Wales have 11,000 cemeteries, costing for the land over
$600 per acre, all dangerous to health, while about $25,000,000 are
annually expended on funerals. For all this cremation was the remedy.

A distinguished English physician, addressing the International
Hygiene Society at Vienna, said that the gain to England in the last
fifty years from improvement in health was equal to $1,500,000,000.

QUININE.--This famous drug, which was once as high as $5 an ounce, has
become very cheap by preserving the trees which were formerly
destroyed in gathering "Peruvian Bark." The drug may now be purchased
in quantities at half a dollar an ounce. The trees now yield a crop of
bark every year. The fashionable sulphate of quinine, which is most
extensively used, I consider the most objectionable form of the drug.
My favorite form is the dextro-quinine, made by Keasby & Matteson,
Philadelphia. But quinine is not at all a necessity. It cou