The state of ignorance of the majority of people concerning the workings of their own bodies and the way to take care of them is to-day one of the greatest barriers to human progress. Few people realize that they ought to care for their bodies; or that they ought to know about their bodies until they are actually broken down. Men use their intelligence more aptly elsewhere; but all progress in other directions, in the arts and crafts and the labors of modern industry, will go for nothing if we do not learn to apply our intelligence to the matter of health. More and more does the need for knowledge press home upon us. It is impossible for the race to survive unless that knowledge is spread. Our ancestors, it is true, knew less of their bodily make-up and bodily care than we do, but our ancestors did not need it so much. They were country dwellers, and people of the open air; they were not slaves of machinery and of office routine. Dr. J. Pease Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, recently read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a paper which vividly summed up the situation which confronts us. He said: “There are four great wastes to-day, the more lamentable because they are unnecessary. They are preventable death, preventable sickness, preventable conditions of low physical and mental efficiency, and preventable ignorance. The magnitude of these wastes is testified to by experts competent to judge. They fall like the shades of night over the whole human race, blotting out its fairest years of happiness. “The facts are cold and bare—one million, five hundred thousand persons must die in the United States during the next twelve months; equivalent to four million, two hundred thousand persons will be constantly sick; over five million homes, consisting of twenty-five million persons, will be made more or less wretched by mortality and morbidity. “We look with horror on the black pages of the Middle Ages. The black waste was but a passing cloud compared with the white waste visitation. Of people living to-day, over eight million will die of tuberculosis, and the federal government does not raise a hand to help them. “THE NEGLECT OF HEALTH A NATIONAL EVIL”