The influence of climate in causing disease, although well known for over two thousand years, has not led to much effort to avoid or prevent effects which are accepted as inevitable by the great majority. It is true that in the effort to secure physical comfort by houses, clothing, artificial heat, and the like, much hygienic work has been done, and the steadily increasing tendency on the part of all who can afford it to seek rest and comfort at the seaside or in the mountains during hot weather is no doubt due, in part, to the fact that experience has shown that the money expended in thus securing health and strength is a good investment. It is unfortunate that "health resorts," so called, do not always prove to be such: they become fashionable, overcrowded; the arrangements for the disposal of excreta are cheap makeshifts, leading to soil- and water-pollution, until finally an epidemic of diarrhoea or typhoid fever occurs, with the usual results. The consideration of climate as a therapeutic agent belongs with the articles relating to the several diseases to which it is applicable. The great desideratum wherewith to place this subject upon a scientific and practical basis is a system of reliable returns of the deaths, and if possible of {186} certain diseases, throughout the country, and especially at those points most in vogue as health resorts. V. HABITATIONS.--That a man's health depends very much on the character, condition, and location of his dwelling-place is now so generally admitted that in many cases where a physician is called in he will be asked whether he thinks the disease has been caused by any peculiarity about the house or the bedroom of the patient. And a careful examination will usually discover in one of them several evils to be remedied, although their connection with the case in hand may be very doubtful. There are very few homes properly constructed from a sanitary point of view; and, although we may not agree with Dr. Wilson, that "the modern prison is in all sanitary essentials the best existing type of what a healthy dwelling ought to be," it is nevertheless certain that the health of the inmates is much more carefully consulted in planning a penitentiary than it usually is in planning a college, a hotel, or a dwelling-house. Matters are gradually improving in this respect: the worst of the tenement-house rookeries and fever-nests in most of our large cities have been improved or abolished, and our wealthier citizens are beginning to pay some attention to their house-drainage as well as to the pattern of their mantelpieces. But the great majority of men are still careless and negligent as to the sanitary condition of their homes, and probably two physicians out of three live in houses in which numerous defects would be pointed out by a sanitary engineer--defects of which they are themselves more or less aware. The majority of people in our large cities under existing conditions cannot afford to have healthy