The cases notified under the Act in 1891 and 1892 have been found to average five or six for every death registered in the corresponding districts, the rate of fatality ranging widely. It is matter of familiar knowledge that many of the attacks and fatalities occur among the richer classes. New comers to an endemic seat of the disease are most apt to take it (this has been elaborately shown for Munich, and holds good for the British troops in India). There are undoubtedly constitutional proclivities to it among individuals, which may run strongly in families. As in other miasmatic infective diseases, such as yellow fever, Asiatic cholera, and (formerly) plague, there seem to be occasions in the varying states of body and mind, as well as in the external circumstances, when the infection of enteric fever is specially apt to find a lodgement and to become effective. The old plague-books gave lists of the things that were apt to invite venom or to stir venom (see former volume pp. 212, 674); and it is probable that some of these hold good also for the incidence of enteric fever. CHAPTER II. FEVER AND DYSENTERY IN IRELAND. The history of the public health in Ireland has been so remarkable that it may be useful to take a continuous view of it in a chapter apart, so far as concerns flux, or dysentery, and typhus with relapsing fever. Ireland is a country which would have given Hume, had he thought of it, the best of all his illustrations of the difficult problem handled in the essay “Of National Characters”--how far the habits, customs, temperaments and, he might have added, morbid infections have been determined by climate, and how far by laws and government, by revolutions in public affairs, or by the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours. Not only is there something special and peculiar in the actual epidemiology of Ireland, but its political and social history has been apt to borrow the phrases of medicine in a figure. “First the physicians are to take care,” says Burke, “that they do nothing to irritate this epidemical distemper. It is a foolish thing to have the better of the patient in a dispute. The complaint, or its cause, ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigour[410].” And this singular use of the imagery of disease in Irish history might be illustrated from many other passages of the same orator and essayist, just as it may be seen any day in the columns of newspapers in our own time. Giraldus Cambrensis began it, within a few years of the first English conquest of Irish territory by Henry II. Writing of that singular effect upon the English settlers by contact with the native Irish, whereby they became, in the words of another medieval author, _ipsis Hibernis hiberniores_, he resorts to the medical figure of “contagion” as the best way to account for it. So again, to overleap six centuries, Bishop Berkeley in his query “whether idleness be the mother or daughter of