to find it difficult to engage hands for pointing the needles. The lure of high wages is absolutely necessary. These enable the miserable victims to drown their sufferings and the sense of their danger, in intoxicating liquors,

There can be no doubt whatever as to the cause of the peculiar species of mortality among the needle pointers. Particles, worn off from the steel and the grinding, stone by their mutual attrition, fly about the workshop. They are drawn in during respiration, and accumulate in the air-cells of the lungs. There they cause the substance, known to physiologists: by the name of coagulable lymph, to be thrown out by the secreting vessels. By this coagulable lymph, and by the thickened mucus, the particles are cemented into small balls. In the early stage of the disease, mucus only, or mucus mixed with blood, is expectorated. But the expec toration changes by degrees, as in other consumptive cases. Purulent matter comes upo and it is very often mixed with the concreted metallic and earthy powder. .immi ná

There does not seem to be any thing in the latter stages of the disease, by which it is distinguished from consumption, induced by other causes, though indeed practitioners

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of medicine might require a fuller description of the state of the lungs after death, than is to be found in any account with which I am acquainted!

The workmen are said to be fully apprized of the end that awaits them, and in despair to neglect all means of relief. Without doubt, the feeling reader will be shocked at the infatuation of these poor wretches, and still more, when he is told that no attempt appears to have been made to preserve them by a guard before the mouth and nostrils. But the self-neglect of the workmen, and the unconcern of the masters, are not phænomená confined to the needle manufactory. We shall find them universal, wherever there is danger of pulmonary consumption. No wonder, therefore, they should occur amid groups of the most abject of human beings, under the total absence of mutual affection, where one party is solicited by a temptation, which ignorance can seldom resist, and the other, rendered insensible to all the motives of humanity, by desire of gain. rondell

An immense list of artisans of different name, whose labours are carried on amid the floating particles of earth and metals, might be subjoined to the needle-grinders. In France, the pulmonary affection of the work

acquired a peculiar name. sa

men in plaister of Paris and marble, has It is called maladie de grés, or maladie de St. Roch. It seems to vary in no material respect from that which is so general in this country. Its course is the same. After death, the substance of the lungs is found indurated and full of tubercles. There are adhésions of the lungs to the membrane lining the ribs, and often one entire lobe of the lungs is destroyed by suppuration.

'The softer dust, that arises during the fabrication of various animal and vegetable substances, is equally capable of bringing on a fatal irritation of the membrane, investing the air-pipes. Flax-dressers may be quoted as an instance. But all those labourers, who live during a great part of their time in an atmosphere, charged with floating animal or vegetable filaments, and even with dust from animal or vegetable substances, are subject to serious complaints of the chest, either of the acute or chronic kind. Cónsumption is the reigning malady. Nor is even the mild influence of the climate of the South of France sufficient to counteract this sort of irritation. The girls who come fresh from the high and airy district of the Ce-vennes, to perform the various operations in

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the silk manufactory at Nimes, from the preparation of the cocoons to the spinning of the silk, suffer like our flax-dressers. Even in a few days, they are described as losing their bloom and all their vivacity. They are seized with a dry cough, by which they soon come to be continually harrassed. They complain of oppressive pain in the chest. Fever often succeeds, and they die consumptive..

On referring to various articles in the statistical reports for Scotland, it will be seen that this is very much the history of the girls who employ themselves so much in spinning in that country. All these are the effects of disorder in the functions of the lungs. It is more than probably the office of this organ to dye the white globules of the chyle into the red particles of the blood. This process being interrupted, no wonder the roses of the cheek should wither. This, though a very efficient one, is indeed not the only cause of that languid air which interests the spectator so much for young people, when their health begins to de-. cline. For if the organs, that are destined to prepare the chyle, do not send it to the chest in a proper state, it cannot be couverted into good blood. Even Mr. Boul

TON's mint cannot stamp the unmalleable metals into beautiful pieces of coin.

The readers of these essays may think the preceding facts, foreign to their own situation. But they are, in truth, as will immediately appear, essential to the formation of clear ideas on the present subject; and it is only on opinions founded upon such ideas, that we can depend for any permanent rel gulation of conduct. Much more than half the ravages of consumption depend upon the general want of such opinions.

"

In passing under review the different orders of phthisical mechanics, it would not be impossible to fix upon a groupe, which should connect those who suffer from hard and coarse powders, with the case of invalids so delicate, that they almost faint, if by chance they enter a room newly swept, and scarce inspire a particle of dust, except what the summer winds brush from the surface of the earth. Among the variety of workpeople, employed in the preparation of materials for the ornaments of dress, there would, I imagine, be found a number, whom confinement and much sitting concur in disposing to consumption, though the disorder is immediately provoked by irritating particles, deposited upon the mucous membrane. Perhaps, were