All Trace Of Human Features Had Departed; It Seemed Hardly Credible That Such Blackened, Distorted, And Mangled Frames Could Contain Human Souls.

There were others who had received musket-shot wounds during the election, and numbers of broken heads, and wounds from knives.

It was sad to know that so much of the suffering to be seen in that hospital was the result of furious religious animosities, and of the unrestrained lawlessness of human violence.

There was one man who had been so nearly crushed to pieces, that it seemed marvellous that the mangled frame could still retain its vitality. One leg was broken in three places, and the flesh torn off from the knee to the foot; both arms and several ribs were also broken. We went into one of the female wards, where sixteen broken legs were being successfully treated, and I could not but admire a very simple contrivance which remedies the contraction which often succeeds broken limbs, and produces permanent lameness. Two long straps of plaister were glued from above the knee to the ankle, and were then fixed to a wooden bar, with a screw and handle, so that the tension could be regulated at pleasure. The medical men, in remarking upon this, observed that in England we were very slow to adopt any American improvements in surgery or medicine.

There were many things in this hospital which might be imitated in England with great advantage to the patients. Each ward was clean, sweet, and airy; and the system of heating and ventilation is very superior. The heating and ventilating apparatus, instead of sending forth alternate blasts of hot and cold air, keeps up a uniform and easily regulated temperature. A draught of cold air is continually forced through a large apparatus of steam-pipes, and, as it becomes vitiated in the rooms above, passes out through ventilators placed just below the ceiling. Our next visit was to the laundry, where two men, three women, and, last but not least, a steam-engine of 45-horse power, were perpetually engaged in washing the soiled linen of the hospital. The large and rapidly-moving cylinder which churns the linen is a common part of a steam laundry, but the wringing machine is one of the most beautiful practical applications of a principle in natural philosophy that I ever saw. It consists of a large perforated cylinder, open at the top, with a case in the centre. This cylinder performs from 400 to 700 revolutions in a minute, and, by the power of the centrifugal force thus produced, the linen is impelled so violently against the sides, that the moisture is forced through the perforations, when the linen is left nearly dry.

Strange as it may appear to those who associate America with plenty and comfort, there is a very large class of persons at New York living in a state of squalid and abject poverty; and in order that the children belonging to it may receive some education, it has been found necessary by the benevolent to supplement the common school system with ragged or industrial schools.

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