ome for private parties, and there is over the whole country a
lack of this scientific evidence. The last report of one of the cabinet
ministers at Washington calls attention to the need, and benefit
arising from reliable testimony, under this head, and asks an
appropriation, which it is hoped may be granted, in the interests of
both health, agriculture, and science generally.

The question of climatic treatment and cure for certain ills is
receiving yearly increased attention, and this will continue until a
specific climate is found for many of the most destructive diseases
afflicting the race.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] The various tables are chiefly from Blodgett's _Climatology_, to
which we are otherwise much indebted.

CHAPTER VII.

CONSUMPTION.

Consumption mapped out.--The east winds.--Comparative
statistics.--Number of original cases of consumption in
Minnesota.--Consumption can be cured.--Rev. Jeremiah Day.--Fresh air the
best medicine.--The benefit of a dry atmosphere.--Equability of
temperature.--The power of the mind over disease.--Kinds of
consumption.--Danger in delays.

To all who are afflicted or threatened with pulmonic troubles the
climate of Minnesota becomes, in view of its reputed freedom from this
scourge, an interesting subject of inquiry.

For a long time it was maintained that this disease was not affected by
climate, but that it was the child of other causes, and that its cure
was impossible; and dread of its visitation became as great as at the
approach of any of the great maladies afflicting mankind.

Later and wiser investigation has proved it to be so much controlled by
climate that it may be practically located on a chart of the globe, if
all the climatic conditions are fully known. Of course, it is not
absolutely confined to any given limit, more than is the yellow fever,
which sometimes makes its appearance as high as the forty-second degree
of latitude, while its actual home, so to speak, is, on this continent,
below the thirty-fifth parallel.

In a medical chart of this country, which we had occasion to examine
many years since, the district where consumption attained its maximum
range was outlined along the coast, beginning with the State of Maine,
having a semi-circular sweep to Fortress Monroe in Virginia, with an
inland limit varying from one to two hundred miles. This is well known,
now, to all the medical profession, to be the territory where _phthisis
pulmonalis_ has