Who should avert this danger? The Government could not. It had no time to sit down and study sanitary science. It was bringing together everything, where it found--nothing. Out of farmers and merchants and students it was organizing the most efficient of armies. It was sending its agents all over the world to buy guns and munitions of war. It was tasking our factories to produce blankets and overcoats, knapsacks and haversacks, wagons and tents, and all that goes to make up the multifarious equipment of an army. It was peering into our dock-yards to find steamers and sailing-vessels out of which to gather makeshift navies, until it could find leisure to build stancher ships. Manifestly the Government had no time for such a work. The existing Medical Bureau was hardly equal to the task. Organized to take charge of an army of ten thousand men, in the twinkling of an eye that army became five hundred thousand. At the beginning of the war the medical staff must have been very busy and very heavily burdened. With great hospitals to build, with troops of willing, but young and inexperienced surgeons to train to a knowledge of their duties and to send east and west and north and south, with every department of medical science to be enlarged at once to the proportions of the war, it had little leisure for excursions into fresh fields of inquiry. That it brought order so quickly out of chaos, that it was able to extemporize a good working system, is a sufficient testimony to its general fidelity and efficiency. It was the Sanitary Commission which undertook this special duty. It undertook to find out some of the laws of health which apply to army life, and then to scatter the knowledge of those laws broadcast.