of the great Jew's quarters in London. It is
over a well of which the water was in much
request, and was, indeed, so popular that
bottles of it used to be conveyed weekly by a
carrier lo one admirer living at a distance.
During the last visitation of cholera,
mortality was great in and about Broad Street,
and came to be traced eventually to the
pump; for it was noticed that when water
from that pump was taken, disease came with
it. It went with it even in the bottles of the
carrier. Here was a poisoned well destroying
Christians, and in its immediate proximity to
the Jews' quarter! Men of the good old times
would have declared the guilt of the Jews
manifest. They would have been fallen upon
and plundered; their young children would
have been brained against the door-posts,
women stabbed, men killed by torture; their
houses would have been burnt, and their
land confiscated. As it was, nobody thought
of sacking Seven Dials, tempting as the spoil
might seem. Probably until this hour it
never entered anybody's head even to imagine
that the Jews might be considered punishable;
although, a few centuries ago, that would
have been the first opinion, and the only one,
in almost every part of Europe. As it was,
we looked into the well, found the contents
of an old sewer oozing into it, and understood
at once the mischief, and the way, by
curing it, to save life and save health in
future.

The botanist and zoologist, the mineralogist
and chemist, have by parallel advances given
great precision to our knowledge of the action
of all kinds of food, and all drugs known as
medicine or poison. The anatomist having
minutely demonstrated the structure of the
body, not overlooking so much as a thread of
nerve, a pin's head's prominence upon a bone,
or a gland upon a membrane; the microscopist
having helped the physiologist to unravel the
mysteries of healthy structure, and to trace
as a pathologist the several changes worked
by each form of disease; the body of man
after death is becoming year after year more
surely a revealer of the secrets that concerned
its life. The vestiges of past disease, and
more especially the nature of that last
disorder against which the breath of life could
not maintain its own, are written in the body
of the dead. Much of this kind of writing is
not yet deciphered; but among the most
readable, the most completely read is that
which records death by violence or poison.
To the man of science now, blood literally
testifies against the secret poisoner, wounds
are dumb mouths no more, but can give
utterance to truths full of significance. Science
which saves life, also brings conviction home
against the man by whom it is destroyed.
Here, then, we have the true defender and
adviser of society, at any rate, in all matters
concerning the protection of our bodies
against poison. To this point, but not quite
to the proper recognition of it, we have, in
the course of social progress, found our way.
Self-interesl now directs us to its recognition.

For our well-being—moral as well as
material—it is of great importance that, even at
the cost of reading less of Plato, Aristotle,
and Pliny, far more time than has hitherto
been given should be given to the diffusion
of a knowledge of those truths in natural
history and science by which the speculations
of the ancients and the superstition of the
later generations have been melted into thinnest
air: to which we owe all that is most
substantial in the increase of the world's
well-being—ships, steam-vessels, factories,
railways, electric-telegraphs, pleasant and
healthy abodes, various and wholesome food,
—out of which all that is most substantial in
our future progress must proceed; by which
we are brought more and more into beneficent
relations with our race, help to man
being fetched by it exclusively from study of
the works of God, and through which our
imagination is encouraged to take only noble
flights. It is the staff given into man's
hand with power in it, as of Aaron's rod. It
is of use daily, and he stumbles often who is
not provided with it.

In the Museum at Kew Gardens, Sir
William Hooker has felt it to be right to exhibit,
side by side, horseradish and aconite, and
write on a label underneath the differences
that exist between the two. He has done
this because over and over again aconite
has been pulled for horseradish; not long
ago, several members of a little dinner-party
in Scotland were added at one stroke to
the roll of victims sacrificed to this
mistake. The instance is typical of thousands,
varying in nature and degree of urgency, but
all bearing upon the fact that the routine of
schools has been left far behind by the activity
of energetic study of the works of God.

Were there diffused more general
knowledge of the main branches of science, there
would be no slowness in the public to
perceive the good uses to which they can turn
the most expert and acute of professed
scientific men. There can be no fact more
unnatural than that a man who has acquired
mastery over any department of science
should be without a vocation in society that
will assure him a good livelihood and ample
honour. Our reproach on this score, no
doubt, lessens annually. Upon the chemist
known to be profoundly versed in his own
art, the requirements of the judge and jury,
of the manufacturer, the trader, and the
farmer, press; business flows in to him; and
it is already evident that there is being
opened here a lucrative profession for
philosophers in the next generation—noble
addition to the ancient group, law, physic, and
divinity. Again, to pass from natural to
what is called pure science, we find the
higher mathematics more and more brought
into use for the settlement of  questions that
arise out of the common business of life.