Propositions Nos. 2 and 3 are of the same character, and have a like origin. It is discouraging to discover how little thorough sifting of beliefs there is among mankind—especially concerning matters of such primary importance as their daily diet—a neglect for which their hair-splitting casuistry on topics of faith and morals in no way atones. The foundation of the notion that men die when deprived of salt (and the inference therefrom that it is because of it), so far as I have been able to trace it, rests on an experience related in the older works on physiology, and copied with childlike confidence into the later ones, to the effect that, more than one hundred years ago, during the wars waged by England on the Continent, several thousand British soldiers, being shut up as prisoners of war in the low countries—at the Hague, I believe—and after an incarceration of many months, all died of disease, induced, it is stated, by being deprived of salt! The same cry, it will be remembered, has been charged to modern nations in more recent wars, and notably during the American Civil War, when the mortality was so great in the southern prisons. It needs no great natural acumen nor book learning to discover that there are other and far more potent disease-inducing causes at work to account for the dreadful mortality—even in these days of superior civilisation and greater humanity. Observation satisfies me that inattention to ordinary sanitary precautions—partly incident to confinement and partly to the rooted superstition in the minds of those who had charge of them, that disease is a something to be fought out with specific medicines after it has appeared, rather than prevented from making its appearance—will abundantly reconcile the facts, if they be facts; and in this I am confirmed by a comparison of the appalling ratio of mortality recorded in some of the most famed of London and Paris hospitals, where gangrene and fevers alone did their deadly work, in spite of the attentions of doctors, without appreciable aid from those inevitable attendants of war-prisons—homesickness, filth and bad diet. Such evidence as this would hardly be received in a trial for larceny; and yet it is solemnly repeated generation after generation by those who should be teachers of teachers.