In America from the day of Washington and all centuries before his time, man has dreaded diseases of the lungs more universally than any other one disease. If we compare pulmonary diseases with other maladies we find more persons die of consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis and nervous coughs than from smallpox, typhus and bilious fever and all other fevers combined. Many diseases of contagious natures do not stay in city, town, country nor an army, but a short time; kills a few and disappears and may not return for many years. The same is the history of yellow fever, cholera and other epidemics. They slay their hundreds and stop as unceremoniously as they began. But when we think of diseases that begin to show their effects in tonsils, trachea and lining membranes of the air passages, we find we are in a boundless ocean; because we find all seasons of the year, which afford changes of weather: Wet, dry, windy, hot and cold, which mark 30° to 60° in twenty-four hours, chills the lungs and whole system, closes the excretory system against renovating equal to deposits, with all other chances to throw out dead matter and gases that destroy blood and life in proportion to the amount and time of abnormal retention. It takes no great mind to know from past observation that a common cold often holds on and settles down to chronic inflammation of the lungs, and the patient dies of consumption, croup, diphtheria, tonsilitis, and as catarrhal trouble stays and begins to waste vitality by failing to oxygenize blood while in the lungs, diphtheria paves the way for the young and old to die of consumption. Dance halls, opera houses, churches, school houses, and all crowded assemblies never fail to inspect and deposit the seeds of consumption in weak lungs.