These views of Macculloch respecting the origin of malaria and its effects on man, were, when first published, and indeed for many years afterwards, looked on with suspicion by the physicians of that day; they were viewed, in truth, as wildly speculative, and wholly unsupported by facts. This opinion still prevails with many, but they are being rapidly borne down by a host of writers--many, it must not be overlooked, enjoying lucrative official appointments, and who thus have a deep and touching interest in supporting and maintaining the theories of Macculloch. An opportunity will occur in the course of this work of tracing briefly the progress of the mania--for such, to a certain extent, it speedily became--and of assigning the merit or demerit of the movement to those to whom it may be due. Here it is only necessary to allude to it as being in fact the source of all those visionary and Utopian schemes for the entire renovation of the social state of man, alternately advocated or deprecated by a press naturally chiming in with the prevailing public feeling. At times the discussion acquires an almost feverish character--as when, for example, during the present summer, “the river” exhaled an odour more than usually unpleasant; at times it cools down in the presence of a proposal to expend many millions of the public money on some wild, untried scheme, under the superintendence of the very men who deliberately, and despite many warnings, reduced “the river” to its present sad condition--of men who had not the candour or the honesty to admit that, proceeding on the conjectures of Macculloch, they hazarded one of the coarsest experiments ever devised on the health of millions.[6] These were the men whose course of action the Registrar-General endeavoured to palliate, on the plausible ground that, although they poisoned the river, the doing so was much less injurious to the inhabitants of London than to suffer the cesspools to continue any longer buried in the earth, although for the most part hermetically sealed! Thus were they permitted in open day to pollute the surface-drains of the metropolis, converting them into sewers--to render the streets and squares impassable--and finally to convert the river itself into a kind of elongated cesspool! This, says the Registrar-General, is an evil of less magnitude than the permitting the cesspools and dead-wells to remain as they were until gradually and cautiously disposed of by other means. [6] See the admirable speech of Mr. Disraeli in his place in Parliament, on the condition of the Thames.