To these facts must be added one more woful than a thousand such,--that Theodore Parker himself, one of the most valuable lives upon the Western Continent, died of consumption in his fiftieth year. The inference which Mr. Parker drew from the family histories given was the following: "Intemperate habits (where the man drinks a pure, though coarse and fiery, liquor, like New England rum) tend to check the consumptive tendency, though the drunkard, who himself escapes the consequences, may transmit the fatal seed to his children." There is not much comfort in this for topers; but the facts are interesting, and have their value. A similar instance is related by Mr. Charles Knight; although in this case the poisoned air was more deadly, and more swift to destroy. Mr. Knight speaks, in his Popular History of England, of the "careless and avaricious employers" of London, among whom, he says, the master-tailors were the most notorious. Some of them would "huddle sixty or eighty workmen close together, nearly knee to knee, in a room fifty feet long by twenty feet broad, lighted from above, where the temperature in summer was thirty degrees higher than the temperature outside. Young men from the country fainted when they were first confined in such a life-destroying prison; the maturer ones _sustained themselves by gin_, till they perished of consumption, or typhus, or delirium tremens." To a long list of such facts as these could be added instances in which the deadly agent was other than poisoned air,--excessive exertion, very bad food, gluttony, deprivation. During the war I knew of a party of cavalry who, for three days and three nights, were not out of the saddle fifteen minutes at a time. The men consumed two quarts of whiskey each, and all of them came in alive. It is a custom in England to extract the last possible five miles from a tired horse, when those miles _must_ be had from him, by forcing down his most unwilling throat a quart of beer. It is known, too, that life can be sustained for many years in considerable vigor, upon a remarkably short allowance of food, provided the victim keeps his system well saturated with alcohol. Travellers across the plains to California tell us that, soon after getting past St. Louis, they strike a region where the principal articles of diet are saleratus and grease, to which a little flour and pork are added; upon which, they say, human life cannot be sustained unless the natural waste of the system is retarded by "preserving" the tissues in whiskey. Mr. Greeley, however, got through alive without resorting to this expedient, but he confesses in one of his letters that he suffered pangs and horrors of indigestion.