Florence Nightingale

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"Nursing is an art; and if it is to be made an art, requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or cold marble compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's Spirit? Nursing is one of the fine arts; I had almost said, the finest of the fine arts."

Miss Nightingale has also written Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, 1863; Life or Death in India, read before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1873, with an appendix on Life or Death by Irrigation, 1874.

She is constantly doing deeds of kindness. With a subscription sent recently by her to the Gordon Memorial Fund, she said: "Might but the example of this great and pure hero be made to tell, in that self no longer existed to him, but only God and duty, on the soldiers who have died to save him, and on boys who should live to follow him."

Miss Nightingale has helped to dignify labor and to elevate humanity, and has thus made her name immortal.

Florence Nightingale died August 13, 1910, at 2 P.M., of heart failure, at the age of ninety. She had received many distinguished honors: the freedom of the city of London in 1908, and from King Edward VII, a year previously, a membership in the Order of Merit, given only to a select few men; such as Field Marshal Roberts, Lord Kitchener, Alma Tadema, James Bryce, George Meredith, Lords Kelvin and Lister, and Admiral Togo.

Her funeral was a quiet one, according to her wishes.