Accordingly, it comes within the province of our Government Health Department to direct, and in some degree supervise, those marital engagements out of which our numbers are so constantly replenished. This important business is closely associated with measures designed in other ways to promote our health, and may be said to begin at the birth of every child. Each infant is carefully examined by medical experts, and registered. Every peculiarity or bodily defect is recorded, and rules of management furnished, as remedies, if found necessary. Every person, young or old, is required periodically to pass a like examination. The personal health register is open to all, and the bodily condition of every inhabitant may be in that way ascertained. None fail to avail themselves of information so greatly concerning themselves. Incipient diseases are in a vast number of cases remedied by this discovery of their unsuspected presence, and the habits of life are often changed in time to head off some latent malady, which in its early stages, nothing but medical science could reveal. The system establishes a public record of the physical standing, either in lurking disease or deformity, of every individual; and as it is made the duty of our health department to declare its judgment of approval in every marriage contract, we have no transmitted disease or deformities of body running through generations, and multiplying the miseries of life, as you have. We have long ago stamped out by this method three-fourths of the diseases which are nourished by the habits of civilization. By this means we have secured a race of men and women so physically perfect as to cause existence to be accepted as a grateful patrimony. You have interrogated nature in her laws of development, and in her processes of modification both in forms and qualities of things, and with a knowledge so acquired, you have cultivated a world of animal and vegetable organisms to your better service. We have done that, too; but we have accomplished in that line something of incomparably more importance to us, in advancing together by due cultivation and care our animal as well as our intellectual selves.