When we completely understand the nature of the infective and contagious diseases it seems well within the bounds of possibility that the systematic destruction of their germs may be carried far enough to remove them altogether from the planet. [18] We have now, even by the highly imperfect measure of quarantine and a period of muzzling (from which, on no evident ground except that it would interfere with the amusements of the governing class to include them, sporting dogs were excluded), apparently banished hydrophobia from Great Britain. If it prove to be the case that just as hydrophobia cannot arise spontaneously, but requires to be "started" by the entry into the blood of an animal of an existing infection, other infective diseases require pre-existing disease before they can arise, we may get rid of them altogether. The dream may appear a wild one. But it is not wilder than the dreams of a thinker who anticipated any one of a hundred common facts of to-day must have appeared to our great-great-grandfathers. It is, of course, not to be supposed that disease can altogether be banished from a world so highly artificial as that of the next century will be. Undoubtedly the growth of sanitary science and the knowledge of the larger facts of hygiene, which is only now beginning to dawn upon us, will have a great influence in correcting some of the evils which over-civilisation at present entails. But the very progress of the art of healing will no doubt have the effect of perpetuating in a manner the existence of illness. Every forward step in medicine serves to save alive some weakling that in a less advanced civilisation would die; and these survivors, possibly propagating their species, will have weak descendants, on whom whatever possibility of disease continues to exist will certainly fasten. The discovery of means by which we can make a weak "constitution" into a strong one is perhaps the least likely of medical innovations. It would be altogether contrary to the general spirit of the times anticipated to expect that we shall have steeled our hearts to the destruction of feeble lives as dangerous to the race. We are much more likely to go on finding better means to perpetuate them: and this means that there will always be work for the doctor, though the infective fevers will have been banished from the earth. Medicine, therefore, will still aspire. But apart from what are called occupation-diseases, caused by certain manufacturing processes (of which the more deadly, as phosphorus match-making, lead-glazing of earthenware and the manufacture of enamelled iron will before long certainly be abolished), the elaborate machinery and rapid travel of the new age must needs exact a certain toll of death and mutilation. The surgeon will have more to do than the physician. Frightful accidents will occur from time to time. The maim, the halt and the blind must pay the price of progress. And it is hardly