their parents. The inhabitants of this enterprising city should remember that to continue to disbelieve in fresh air will inevitably lead to physical degeneration. PARK ACREAGE OF CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES. Dr. Gould, in a recent article, has formulated a table giving a classification of open spaces as to size, together with the largest open space in acres for certain American cities. What will strike the reader of this table most is the tendency in cities to large parks and the absence of a liberal number of small open spaces in the squalid portions in which the population is densely herded together, and where light and air are most needed. In conclusion, it should be pointed out that some of our leading American cities are making provision for new open spaces. Indeed, there is scarcely a representative city-excepting Pittsburgh, of course-in the Union which is not to day bestowing some attention upon the subject of its interior adornment by means of parks and other open spaces, as well as wide and long park-ways; and this is not a question demanding the attention merely of physicians and leaders in social reform, but of all citizens also. Washington can boast of an ideal park system, with which that of no *Park Areas and Open Spaces in America and European Cities. Reprint from publications of the American Statistical Association. other city can be compared. In 1866 Chicago began to take decided steps toward creating public parks, and it now ranks next to Washington in point of desirable features in the arrangement of its interior open spaces. In Boston the subject has been before the people for many years, and the excellent results accomplished there are well known to students of municipal history; and the same thing is true of St. Paul, Minneapolis, and of Providence. In New York the movement began in 1881, and already much has been done in the direction of opening up new pleasure grounds. As late as May, 1888, Philadelphia was awakened to the necessity of creating additional park areas through the influence of a few public-spirited men and women, who about the same time formed the "City Park Association." This is an active organization which has. already achieved excellent results and has been the means of giving Philadelphia five new and valuable public parks. The Conveyance of Disease by Corpses.* BY B. FRANK KIRK, Of Germantown, Pa. ANY of us may inhale the germ, but if the conditions of our body are not predisposed, it does no harm. Doctors do not yet agree just in what the predisposition consists. It is not a pleasant piece of news to be told how the germ gets into the air. This is the formulas. The masses of tissue loosened and expectorated by consumptives become dried, ground up in many ways, and rise into the air by every disturbance, and they can be caught upon the clothing and carried with us to be spread by the winds. Handkerchiefs used by the sick become dry. The patient may carry his money in the same pocket with his handkerchief. He pays his butcher with a note; the jolly butcher claps the note between his lips while he makes the change. He pays his grocer, who in turn gives his wife the boodle to buy headgear. She instinctively places the money in her bosom as the safest place and nearest to her heart, and her infant child sucks its nutriment and bacilli at one and the same time. We can conjecture a hundred ways more in which the poison can be handed around. Bank notes certainly are a ready vehicle in transmitting disease. They are most fitly titled as filthy lucre. It occurs at this moment to present a case not unusual in our experience. A young gentleman in business at Panama returned home and died of yellow fever. In preparing the body for burial we found a belt, inside of which was a large sum of money. The sufferer in his agony had perspired so freely that the notes had absorbed the moisture from his body to the extent of almost reducing the notes to a pulp. We spread them to dry while we finished our duties, and then gave them to the young * Abstract of an address delivered before the Funeral Directors' Association of Pennsylvania at Erie. man's father. Every piece of clothing, all the bedding and the curtains around the chamber were carried out and burned, but the precious all potential and welcome boodle, to the amount of over a thousand dollars, was most dexterously and unceremoniously dropped in the capacious side pocket of the now half-consoled father. We received our pay out of this money, and how many others got a share the Lord only knows. Had the conditions and surroundings been such at that time as to have been susceptible of receiving the poisonous germs, we might have cultivated a little crop of yellow fever. We have received money from smallpox patients in the same pleasant manner. The fact that germs of disease can readily be distributed and carried about is absolutely proven, and cannot be ignored. It certainly becomes a duty, a very peremptory duty, to intelligently study how to avoid planting the more malignant epidemics that appear at intervals and run their course. But by the superior knowledge of the physicians of to-day, and the co-operation of intelligent undertakers, with sensible and effective sanitary rules, these outbreaks can be confined to a small territory: Undertakers have not failed to notice the sinful carelessness of persons in letting loose the demon of disease and death. A few circumstances might be mentioned, which in themselves are only too common to us, but seldom thought of by the people. But see, for instance, milk is declared by competent authority to be the best absorbent known of the bacilli of typhoid and scarlet fevers and other diseases, and it has been established to a certainty that scarlet fever and diphtheria have been thus transmitted. Some time ago we had charge of a typhoid case just outside the city limits. We found the corpse resting upon a long table in a large room. In that room, upon a series of shelves, there stood at least twenty shallow tin basins containing milk, all open to the contaminating atmosphere of the room, so placed that the cream might rise to the surface to be distributed in the early morning to their city customers. At one end of the room lay the soiled clothing just removed from the corpse, as well as a portion of the foul bedding. We at once called the family's attention to the danger of such an exposure of the dead body and soiled clothing in proximity to the milk, but were most decidedly assured that the matter gave them no uneasiness at all, as they intended to send it all to the city for sale the next morning and not use it themselves. And so they did, and then placed the next day's supply in the same place. And this was a family by no means ignorant, but simply indifferent. At another place, a person also died of typhoid fever, we found in the rear of the house a large filthy cow stable. Ten yards off a water-closet of the worst character, and in the line between them a shallow well, but we were kindly cautioned against drinking the water, as it was only used to supply the cows with drink and to wash milk pans. To our certain knowledge typhoid fever did prevail in two families where these people served milk, and we suppose you think we co-operated in sharing the benefit of this crime, as we had two profitable funerals. We had a dear friend, a pious old lady, who, moved by the best of motives, but ignorant of the nature of infec tion or contagion, used to visit poor families where sickness prevailed and loan picture-books and magazines to the afflicted, no matter what the disease. The more terrible the nature of the ailment the more daring she would be, knowing full well, just as we know, that combined poverty and loathsome disease are not interviewed by gilt-edged charity. She considered it her sphere of duty to thus let in one ray of beautiful sunlight by pious attention upon the noisome hovels easily found, but not sought for. She carried a lot of these books from a house where two children had died of diphtheria to a home a few blocks away, where some light sickness had attracted her notice. We asked her if she did not think it a dangerous proceeding to` thus carry her books around and spread disease. She answered, "The Lord directed every good work." As she seemed to think she had the co-operation of the Lord, we simply waited until our services were needed at some of her new calling places. A wealthy lady, whose little boy we carried to the tomb, after it had died of scarlet fever, requested us to carry in our wagon a large bundle of its clothing to a poor family not far away. When we meekly suggested that the articles had better be disinfected first, she seemed hurt, and with a look of ineffable scorn repelled the imputation that any disease lurked in the habiliments of her precious babe. But we must do the lady the justice due her big kind heart, and testify to the fact that she contributed quite largely to the expenses attending the burying of two children of the poor woman whose little ones soon wilted and perished of scarlet fever after receiving the package of fine clothing. Almost on top of this instance we placed a victim of smallpox in his coffin, and a person who was very officious and aided us with a will to do the work, went straight to a social gathering without changing his clothes or washing his hands, but it was all right, nevertheless, for the body was placed in the coffin in strict conformity with sanitary rules, while the clothes and bedding were heaved out upon the shed roof for the benefit of an appreciative and curious neighborhood. Is Life Worth Living?* BY D. H. BECKWITH, M.D., Of Cleveland, Ohio. President of the Ohio State Board of Health. it. life." Is life worth living? If life is not worth living, we need not concern ourselves about prolonging Well, suppose we decide that life is worth living. We know the inexorable law of nature that life must end in death. We know, also, that a wise man said: "Our years are threescore years and ten," expressing thereby the physiological limit set to the life of man. * Abstract of an address delivered before the Ohio State Board of Health. Do you know that this estimate, made many thousands of years ago, shows a wonderful knowledge on the part of its author? Since his day science has taken hold of the question, and the result of the most elaborate and careful observations has been to place the physiological limit of human life just where this wise Jew placed it-threescore years and ten. The death of man comes, with the death of all living things, as a law of nature. He is worn out, and ceases therefore to continue. The nature and causes of the death of the body are questions that lie within the province of natural science. Now what does science say? It says: "Every form of life has its special type of existence," from the tiny object that sports a short hour in the sunbeam, and then dies, to the ponderous elephant, whose life covers more than a century. We have, I say, between these a myriad of beings, each class of which follows its own type, has its definite limit of existence, and, like man, "dies when its time comes." Gentlemen, this is the source of the unity and harmony of nature. Only in this way can nature maintain an equilibrium of existence among the innumerable creatures that swarm the surface of the earth. I believe that the love of life is instinctive in every human being. Only by some dreadful catastrophe, whether it be like the explosion of the dynamite or like the insidious and fatal work of dry rot, only until calamity or decay has done its worst, does the largest or the most insignificant soul lose its love of life. "When all the blandishments of life are gone The coward sneaks to death." But one more nobly sings: "Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream." Loving it, what more natural than its continuance should be, if possible, preserved? Ah! gentlemen, this was the wild dream centuries ago; when Ponce de Leon crossed unknown seas in search of the fountain that would give eternal youth, he was driven by the breath of many ages, whose sighs for immortality have been flowing across centuries. De Leon has many successors, who, not daunted by his failures, still pursue the ever-eluding "ignis fatuus." The old alchemist who, in the privacy of his cell, sought for that touchstone that could turn all baser metals to gold, kept his eye always on the possibility of finding that wonderful something which would forever cheat old age and death. The most modern exemplification of this hope, which has never quite died out of the human breast, was the almost universal craze in the use of Dr. Brown-Sequard's Elixir of Life. Scarcely had he whispered it in the air before the swift telegraph carried it to the bounds of civilization, and, not waiting to learn the exact conditions of his methods, thousands of physicians--` educated and experienced men, whom we might suppose knew something of the laws of pathology and physiology-seized upon the idea with the zeal of |