Much confusion also at present arises from patch-work legislation that has not been based on sound principles. This is shown by the present Acts regulating towns: ‘A recent edition of the laws affecting health and sanitary affairs gives the text of fifteen Acts relating to health, diseases prevention, nuisances, local government, sewage, and kindred subjects; twelve Acts consolidating provisions as to towns, lands, markets, police, loans, bakehouses, etc. The public health and local government supplemental Acts are twenty-nine in number, while the laws treated by the work are affected by not less than 296 public general statutes, which the author tabulates in the index as being referred to in the text. No lawyer can grasp these enactments save by great research, much less can a man who has his own business affairs to look after.’ The sanitary investigations carried on by the Privy Council and other government bodies, the labours of the Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the condition of the poor, etc., cannot be overestimated; but none feel more strongly than the very men who are carrying on these measures the necessity of effort in other directions--directions where the co-operation of every member of society is needed--viz., in education and in domestic and social life. We now possess enough sanitary knowledge to reform the physical and moral condition of the human race if it were generally diffused and its rules systematically applied. Scientific investigations and the knowledge of hygienic laws are far in advance of the practices of daily life. The knowledge is within our reach, which, if employed, would save the lives of tens of thousands of human beings around us, keep this army of sick in vigorous health, and make our homes the precious centres of ennobling influence that they are intended to be. We fail, however, in the means of diffusing and putting into practice the substantial knowledge which scientific observation has laid before us. The first duty, therefore, which rests upon us all is an endeavour to secure the universal diffusion of sanitary knowledge. As every human being in the British Isles should know how to read and write, so every human being should be taught that health is a duty, and shown how to secure it. Sanitary teaching (varying, of course, in its style) should be introduced into every school and college in the kingdom--in the common school, in Oxford and Cambridge equally, into every series of lectures, whether at the Royal Institution or the South Kensington Museum, into every Working Man’s Institute, and into every medical and every theological seminary.