whereabouts of those infamous wretches are to be discovered; the channels through which pass the ready and eagerly looked-for information of how and where the act may be produced; the baneful effects of the poisonous compounds of pills and mixtures advertised so cunningly, yet so meanly, in some of our daily papers. To inform these legal gentlemen of the quality and kind of evidence which physicians could present to fix the guilt upon abortionists, of their commission of the crime, and, in short, to present all information within their reach to enable them to draft an act which should be so perfect in its construction, and so complete a legal network, as would defy even the smallest of these criminals passing through its meshes. Such an act presented to our legislature, and properly backed up by the influence of the various Christian churches and the medical profession, would readily be enacted into a law. Then would our courts find easy that which they now for want of law find almost impossible-the conviction of the abortionists, male and female, learned and ignorant, professional and unprofessional, who now are steeped to the lips in crime, and upon whose hands is the stain of the blood of so many murdered innocents.

If, in the discharge of an imposed duty, we have, because of the facts, been compelled to present woman not robed in all her charms and radiant with all her virtues and loveliness, as would indeed have been a pleasant task, be assured that we have

"Nothing extenuated,

Nor set down aught in malice,"

but have tried to tell "a plain unvarnished tale." In part, because we would have woman pure and undefiled, we have added our weak words to those that have so often been called into requisition for her elevation upon so many previous occasions, here and elsewhere. Estimating highly woman's interests as a Christian, accountable to God and the community for her transgressions of Divine and statutory law, we have not dragged criminal abortion before you for the purpose of calling down odium upon woman, or to invite contumely and contempt to be cast upon her. No, no, far from it. We have been actuated and influenced by the desire to serve her by suggesting means productive of her special intellectual enlightenment, moral purification, and disenthralment from a most disgusting and fast increasing mortal sin. In the furtherance of this work we beg and implore most respectfully your efficient aid. Our aim has been to present in its truthful characters, no matter how disgusting they are, a crime not only of great magnitude as regards its enormity, but one of vast and almost immeasurable pro

portions, because of the almost universality of its practice; a crime by no means confined to the degraded classes of society, but practised and cherished alike by the genteel, and the meretricious, paintbedaubed, and gewgaw bedecked brazen daughters of sin, who in the public highways boldly ply their art, and who dwell in homes which have not been inaptly styled "the vestibules of hell."

The commission of this crime is not confined to the harlot, but finds in sadness and shame, it must be said, a large, nay the larger proportion of devotees among the refined, the learned, the higher classes, while the poor and the lowly are not strangers to its enormity, nor free from its commission. We use no honeyed words— but utter the truth, and if by such utterance we offend the sensibilities of the over-sensitive, we regret it; but we cannot, will not stop to soften sentences or modify truths when contending with an evil of such gigantic proportions as criminal abortion, and which, for its its destruction, demands all and more than that which we have suggested.

A. NEBINGER,

Chairman.

NOTE.-The above report was made to the Medical Society of Pennsylvania, at the meeting held in Erie, Penna., June, 1869, but was not ordered to be published. It now is published in the Transactions of the Society by the adoption of a resolution offered by Dr. Hiram Corson, of Montgomery County. (See the minutes of the meeting of the Society, page 35, of this volume.)

A. N.

REPORTS

FROM

COUNTY MEDICAL SOCIETIES.

FORM OF COUNTY REPORTS TO THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA.'

I-CAUSES WHICH MODIFY THE HEALTH OF THE COUNTY.

1. LOCALITY:

Boundaries of County, and its situation in the State.

Its proximity to large rivers and the lakes; to mountain ranges; their direction and extent.

2. HYDROGRAPHY OR DRAINAGE:

Size and direction of watercourses, and of the dividing ridges, or water-sheds.

Extent of river bottom.

Power and rapidity of streams; danger and frequency of inundation.

Quantity of marshy or springy soil.

Artificial water channels and reservoirs; amount of lockage.

3. TOPOGRAPHY:

Area and mean altitude of County.

Population and their lineage; chief avocations.

Location and size of principal towns.

General character of surface; principal valleys and eminences. Nature and extent of surface destitute of vegetation, tilled, covered with forest, or in grass.

Agricultural produce; kinds of timber; effects of clearing and of drainage on climate; extent of artificial irrigation.

4. GEOLOGY:

Geological position, actual location, dip, direction, and extent of the different formations.

Character of soil, subsoil, and subjacent rock.

Source and nature of water used for domestic purposes.
Supply of water to towns; kind of pipes used as conduits.
Map with geological features named, and colored agreeably to
the order adopted by the State Geologist.

5. METEOROLOGY:3

Latitude, longitude, and altitude of observer.

1See printed Transactions, vol. v. p. 52.

2 Inclose, by dotted lines with proper marginal references, those sections of the county in which epidemics have prevailed.

* Observers for the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, as well as for the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, reside in a number of the counties, and would furnish all the meteorological information required. See page 16, Part iii. 1858.