The versatility of Miss Nightingale’s pen is shown by her next publication, _The Sanitary State of the Army in India_, which came out in 1863. The hand which could write with such tender womanly concern about baby could deal vigorous blows at the insanitary condition of the soldiers in India. She had been keenly interested in Lord Herbert’s scheme for uniting the Indian with the Home army, and followed it up by a thorough investigation of the causes affecting the health of the army in India. An elaborate series of written evidence procured from all the principal stations of India by the Royal Commission appointed for the purpose, was laid before Miss Nightingale in 1861, and at the request of the Commission she wrote a valuable paper of comments on the reports. Lord Stanley succeeded Lord Herbert as President of the Commission, and to him Miss Nightingale addressed her observations, which form a book of some hundred pages. She points out in her usual concise style the evils arising from the defective sanitation of the camps, the bad water, lack of drainage, and the imperfections of the hospitals, and deals with the preventable causes which lead to drunkenness and a low tone of morality amongst the Indian troops. The state of the army in India continued to be a matter of great concern to Miss Nightingale, and at the request of the National Social Science Congress she prepared a paper on the subject, to which she gave the arresting title “How People may Live and not Die in India.” This was read at the Edinburgh meeting in 1863, and published in pamphlet form the following year. In a prefatory note Miss Nightingale refers with pleasure to the improvement in the condition of the soldiers which had taken place in many respects. The introduction of soldiers’ gardens, trades, and workshops enabled the men to realise that it was better to work than to sleep and to drink, even during hot weather. She gives an interesting instance of how these reforms had worked. “One regiment marching into a station,” she writes, “where cholera had been raging for two years, were ‘chaffed’ by the regiments marching out, and told they would never come out of it alive. “The men of the entering battalion answered, They would see; we _won’t_ have cholera. And they made gardens with such good effect that they had the pleasure not only of eating their own vegetables, but of being paid for them too by the commissariat. And this in a soil which no regiment had been able to cultivate before. And not a man had cholera. These good soldiers fought against disease, too, by workshops and gymnasia, and at a few hill stations the men have covered the whole hill-sides with their gardens.”