When Dr. Williams commenced his investigations in this particular field of research, and when Laennec and Louis were still the great authorities on the subject, the duration of consumptive disease was held to be, on the average, two years. From Dr. Williams' selected cases it appears that the duration of the disease is now eight years. Of the one thousand cases selected for discussion 198 have ended fatally, while 802 relate to the history of persons still alive. Of the 802 living cases 34, or 4.5 per cent., have been apparently cured; 280 cases, or 38 per cent., have been benefited by medical and regiminal treatment; 102 cases, or 13.39 per cent., have remained for some time stationary; and 321 cases, or 43.53 per cent., are on the downward road, despite all that can be done for them by the physician's sagacity and art. Only 65 of the thousand selected cases prove to be unavailable for the objects of this classification.

The reason for the auspicious change in the duration of the disease, Dr. Williams remarks, is unquestionably the better understanding of the cause of the disorder, and the consequent improvement of its treatment by the physician. His testimony upon this point is very interesting and clear. He says that during the first ten years of his experience the beneficial results of treatment were small, and limited to the influence upon incipient cases of a sea-voyage and residence in mild climates. In the next ten years of his experience a marked advance was obvious, and attributable to the employment of a more liberal diet and the use of the iodide of potassium and of vegetable tonics as medicines. But in the last ten years the improvement was very considerable and marked, and in the main due to the general use of cod-liver oil in consumptive cases. His own words in regard to this royal medicine for consumption are: I have no hesitation in stating my conviction that cod' liver oil has done more for the consumptive than all other means put together.' The curative influence of the ready he believes to be chiefly due to its power of dissolving and removing the depraved deposit; but he is convinced that it also acts as an eminently nutritious principle, increasing the amount of healthy plasma and diminishing the fibrinous constituents in the blood. He says of it:

'It is an oily matter well borne by the stomach; easily diffused by emulsion through the alimentary mass; readily absorbed by the lacteals, in which it contributes to form a rich molecular base in the chyle; apt to saponify with the basic salts of the blood; and, when diffused with this fluid through the capillaries of the body, capable of penetrating to all the textures and of exercising its solvent and softening action on the solid fats of old deposits, whilst it affords a rich pabulum for the sarco

phytes (colourless blood-corpuscles) and bioplasm of the blood, tissuecells, and lymphatics.'

The chief necessity, in regard to the remedial employment of cod-liver oil, seems to be that it shall be taken perseveringly and steadily for long periods of time, and that it shall be used immediately after a meal, so that it may mingle itself at once with the digesting food and take part in its sustaining offices. Dr. Williams states that, in a practice of twenty-five years, he has had occasion to prescribe cod-liver oil for between twenty and thirty thousand patients, and that of these 95 per cent. have been able to continue its use for the requisite time without material difficulty, and 90 per cent. have more or less benefited from its employment.

Dr. Williams speaks very graphically of the lymphatic system as the seed-bed of the flesh-germs-the lymph-corpuscles and 'blood-corpuscles,' and regards the scrofulous taint, the particular blood-state which leads to consumptive deposit and disorganisation, as a degradation of blood-plasm originating in that lymphatic system seed-bed. All measures of treatment and management, for those who are threatened with the consumptive taint in any form, resolve themselves: First, into the maintenance of the blood-plasm and flesh-plasm in their most vigorous and healthy condition; and secondly, into the careful avoidance or immediate arrest of inflammatory attacks on the respiratory organs, which are most prone to become the seat of the phthinoplastic deposit. The book treats very fully and clearly of the various expedients by which both ends may be most efficiently secured; and it does that in so simple and untechnical a way that its pages may be advantageously consulted by everyone who has a personal ground for interest in the information there conveyed. The more technical parts of the book, which deal with the various pathological details of the subject, and with the illustrations that have been found in special cases, are also of the highest value, as the gleanings of close and philosophic observation in a field of large experience; but they are addressed to a different circle of readers.

The main value of such monographs as those which it is the object of this article to bring into notice is the unconscious influence they exert in the creation of an intelligent public opinion upon a subject that is of great practical moment. No intellectual reform is more needed, and more ardently to be desired, than that every responsible head of a family in the social community should have clear views upon such matters as have here been dealt with. The problem of sanitary regulation by the State, which is already beginning to assert itself

in somewhat loud tones, must grow into ever-increasing importance and urgency where a still multiplying population, already numbering thirty millions of souls, is contained within the unelastic bounds of one hundred and twenty thousand square miles of sea-girt territory. It has been the reproach of civilised communities that the centres of aggregation are the haunts and strongholds of evil influences which leave the wild places of Nature more desirable homes for man than cities and towns. But it is the privilege of civilised communities that their great centres of aggregation may, by the application of knowledge and cultured intelligence, be made in every sense better homes for man, and more advantageous fields both for the exercise of the human faculties and the enjoyment of human existence, than the unimproved face of the wilderness. There will no longer be hesitation as to the means by which this desirable object may be most surely advanced in a land which aspires to be in the van of civilised progress, when the leaders of its intellectual life and thought have as clear an apprehension and as keen a perception for the teachings of physiological and physical science as they have for political and social relations and questions. The ultimate solution of the great public health problem rests with the enlightenment of the public mind regarding the broad issues upon which hang health and disease, and life and death.

ART. VIII.-The Japanese in America. By CHARLES LANMAN, American Secretary to the Japanese Legation in Washington. London: 1872.

AT opposite sides of the globe, separated from each other by the whole breadth of Europe and Asia, and fringing the great continent from which they are only parted by a narrow belt of sea, are two countries, each composed of a group of islands distinguished alike for the beauty of their scenery and the fertility of their soil, although not in the same parallels of latitude, for the Japanese islands lie between the 31° and 45° of North latitude, and the British between the 50° and 59. The parallel of 40° North latitude, which cuts through the middle of Japan, also cuts through Sardinia, the Island of Minorca, and the centre of Spain and Portugal. Southern, not Northern Europe, therefore, might best claim affinity with Japan, its products and its people, if latitude were the sole guide to those marks of outward form and type which suggest or simulate natural relationship. Notwithstanding this

considerable difference in the latitude, so nearly allied are the climates of the two groups in some essential features, that a question arises how the near agreement in the conditions of vegetation is to be accounted for? The isothermal lines and the marine influences to which each belt of narrow islands is subject may go far to explain the resemblance in plants, and the power of transferring a considerable majority of the beautiful flowers and shrubs which are peculiar to Japan to our shores. In consequence of the narrowness of the islands, seldom presenting a width of more than a hundred miles, the vegetation may be considered wholly marine, and hence the plants which flourish there are peculiarly adapted for introduction into the southern and western districts of our sea-girt isles that have a mild climate and humid atmosphere. These facts, authenticated by contributors to the Gardener's Magazine,' indicate marvellous likeness in the midst of considerable diversity of outward form and volcanic soil. It strikes the imagination the more forcibly that this analogy is not without its counterpart in the social and political world. The contrasts and dissimilarities of course are many. Of different race, faith, language, and traditions,the Japanese are placed as far apart, to all appearance, from ourselves as the actual space which separates the two countries. And yet if these two peoples of the rising and setting sun were brought in close comparison--not in the nineteenth, but in the tenth or twelfth centuries-numerous points of resemblance might be traced in their social, economic, and political institutions. In the feudal framework of our early government, the fiefs and military service, the knights in armour, with their pendants, cognizances, and men-at-arms; the monarchical form of authority, the cloisters and convents, the commercial guilds, and relations of classes towards each other, urban and rural, with serfdom and bondage to the soil,-in all these things there may be traced a parallelism of form which it is impossible to mark without interest, in countries utterly unknown to each other-and much too widely separated, before the discovery of America and the passage round the Cape, for any kind of communication to have taken place, if even their mutual existence had been suspected on either side. It is true that caravans from Europe traversed the whole breadth of Asia at an earlier period; and Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, had already roused the curiosity of his countrymen and the learned of other nations by the information he was able to give of an Eastern country called Zipangri, and of the great wealth of the island, particularly

in gold and pearls, and the multitude of smaller islands which encompassed it. From him his half-doubting audience, Genoese and Venetians, who gave him the sobriquet of 'Marco Millione,' undoubtedly derived their first knowledge of the existence of Japan. And it is one of the strange links in the chain of historical events, and the seemingly accidental connexion between cause and effect, that beyond all doubt it was the account brought to Europe by Marco Polo, at the close of the thirteenth century, which stimulated the imagination of Columbus in the fifteenth, and led him to the discovery, not of Japan, but of a new world in America, while searching for Zipangri. These are among the curiosities, not of literature but of history, and suggest many reflections as to the true nature of the laws and influences which govern the sequence and order of events.

When three Portuguese adventurers of doubtful antecedents, with Mendez Pinto among the number, made their appearance in the Japanese waters, in the middle of the sixteenth century, under the guidance of the Chinese captain of a corsair junk, they were the first representatives of Europe and a Western race who had ever reached those shores. Of Coreans, Chinese, Malays, and Siamese Japan had gained some knowledge, but it had never seen or heard of a Western race. What the Japanese were at that date as a nation, unspoiled by any foreign contact or influence, Mendez Pinto has himself related in the narrative of his own adventures, piratical and commercial-for they partook of both, as was the manner of the times. We are told that the Japanese, though vigilant and on their guard, manifested no reluctance to admit the strangers. This, which was the beginning of European intercourse and trade, carries us back to the year 1543. We get glimpses of the state of the country and people throughout the succeeding century from navigators— John Adams, the English pilot, not to be forgotten-English, Dutch, and Portuguese; and from missionaries, chiefly Portuguese and Spanish, with some Italians. But our most reliable data were supplied in the following century by Kompfer-physician, naturalist, philosopher, and the most painstaking and conscientious of chroniclers. When he came on the scene, in the suite of his Dutch trading patrons, in 1692, no foreigners were allowed free access to any port in Japan. All except the Dutch had been expelled, and these were only admitted to an island-prison at Decima, in Nagasaki harbour -spread out like a fan, and specially created for their safe custody by the most jealous and watchful of guardians.