If--as is rumoured, the approaching re-constitution of the General Board of Health is (after the pattern of the Poor-law Board) to give it a Parliamentary President, that member of the Government ought to be open to challenge in respect of every matter relating to health. What, for this purpose, might be the best subordinate arrangements of such a Board, it would take a volume to discuss. But at least as regards its constituted head, sitting in Parliament, his department should be, in the widest sense, to _care for the physical necessities of human life_. Whether skilled coadjutors be appointed for him or not; engineers--lawyers--chemists--pathologists; whether he be, as it were, the foreman of this special jury, or, according to the more usual precedent of our public affairs, collect advice on his own responsibility, and speak without quotation of other authority than himself, his voice, unless the thing is to be a sham, must represent all these knowledges. The people, through its representatives, must be able to arraign him wherever human life is insufficiently cared for. He must be able to justify or to exterminate adulterations of food; to shew that alum ought to be in our loaves, or to banish it for ever; to shew that copper is wholesome for dessert, or to give us our olives and greengages without it; to shew that red-lead is an estimable condiment, or to divert it from our pepper-pots and curries. Similarly with drugs and poisons--the alternatives of life and death--a minister of Public Health would, I presume, be responsible for whatever evils arise in their unlicensed and unregulated sale. He would hardly dare to acquiesce in our present defencelessness against fraud and ignorance; in doses being sold--critical doses, for the strength of which we, who prescribe them, cannot answer within a margin of _cent. per cent._; or in pennyworths of poison being handed across the counter as nonchalantly as cakes of soap.[7] Surely, before he had been six months in office, he would have procured some enactment to remedy this long neglect of the legislature, by providing that the druggist’s trade be exercised only after some test of fitness, and in subjection to certain regulations. [7] Without referring to what may be considered rare--the sale of poison for the purposes of intended homicide, I may remind the reader of the very dreadful facts collected by the Commissioners on Trades and Manufactures, as to the immense sales of opium in our principal manufacturing towns, for the purpose of quieting--and with the effect of killing, children, while their poor mothers are absent from home in their several occupations.