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312 earnestness of any individual or community in reference to any subject is a willingness to spend money in the furtherance of it," and the five hundred dollars that was to be spent in 1849, in finding out whether the State had best do anything toward public hygiene, and the $62,876.82 that was spent in 1893 for expert work by her trained corps of sanitarians, are capital indices of the contrasting condition of public opinion at the two periods.

Knowledge and light can not be fenced in or shut out, and the example set in the early home of the Puritans saw its first answering spark on the Pacific coast. It was only two decades since the irruption of the Forty-niners when California, in 1870, established her State Board, "in order to remain on the level of other intelligent people in other States." Her influential citizens had gone from the East as grown men, and some of them had been disciples of Lemuel Shattuck in Boston. Some of our young States have made astonishing advances, because not hampered with a set of conservative obstructionists, and when once started on the track of progress have shown a fruitful activity quite overshadowing the action of older communities. In the very next year Minnesota established a State Board, and thus a nucleus for the growing work of preventive medicine was planted on the four borders of the land, that at New Orleans being the most palpable and obvious, as the quarantining and disinfecting and fumigating of yellow fever, is a much more perceptible process than the noiseless but sure elimination of malarial fever from Maryland by extensive sanitary underdraining.

Two of the men who had investigated the Maplewood fever were professors in the medical college at Ann Arbor. They were indefatigable in efforts to influence the Legislature, and did not rest till Michigan had a State Board of Health, with Dr. Henry B. Baker as its secretary—an enthusiastic knight of sanitary science, possessed of a phenomenal ingenuity in popularizing its study among the million, and in making its work valuable. The work it has done in reducing the death-rate from scarlatina, diphtheria, and smallpox is a true nineteenth-century miracle.

Maryland and the District of Columbia followed in 1874, Mississippi in 1875, and Tennessee in 1877. It required eight years to get ten boards, and when we scan the legislation that gave them being, and see how little money was given them to work with—scarcely enough to pay necessary postage on the letters that must pass before any rapport could be established between the central authority and the separate municipalities—it is apparent that the public mind was far from convinced as to their utility, and the public heart was by no means "fired" with zeal to aid their work. A pathetic story attaches to the North Carolina Board. Dr. Thomas F. Wood—one of those patient,