Brief reference may be made also to the experiments conducted to ascertain if cigars and cigarettes, as sold, contain the tubercle bacillus. The more interest attaches to this investigation because it is well known that the operators employed in tobacco factories are, as a rule, an unhealthy class, diseases of the respiratory organs, and especially tuberculosis, being very prevalent amongst them. A German official report on this subject states that the average duration of life of such factory hands only reaches thirty-eight years. Doubtless the lightness of the occupation encourages many to seek employment in these factories whose state of health would debar them from obtaining work under more trying circumstances. Some of the conditions under which cigars and cigarettes are made, such as the workers using their saliva to facilitate the rolling of them and fixing of the leaves, and the testing of the "drawing" properties of a cigar by placing it in the mouth, with the facilities offered for the dissemination of dried tuberculous sputum as dust, contribute to make it highly probable that tobacco as it leaves the factory may contain the germs of consumption. Before leaving the subject of tobacco and disease germs it may be of interest to inquire what justification in fact there is for the practice adopted by anxious mothers, when travelling in times of epidemics of zymotic disease, of thrusting themselves and their children into the sanctum of the other sex--the smoking compartment of a railway carriage. I have frequently seen this done, despite the voluble protests of its legitimate occupants. Tassinari has made some very interesting experiments on the effect of tobacco smoke on the vitality of various descriptions of disease germs. He constructed an apparatus in which he suspended pieces of linen soaked in broth infected with the particular micro-organism to be tested. Tobacco smoke was then admitted, and the microbes were retained in this stifling atmosphere for half an hour. In these surroundings cholera and typhoid germs were destroyed, and other bacteria, such as the anthrax bacillus and the pneumonia bacillus, were so prejudicially affected, that when subsequently transferred to their normal surroundings it was only with extreme difficulty that they could be revived. When, however, the tobacco smoke was made to pass through water before reaching the bacteria, its pernicious influence was entirely removed, and the latter suffered no detriment. Hence the practice, so often seen in the East, of passing tobacco smoke through rose or other perfumed water before inhaling it, whilst doubtless rendering it less noxious to the smoker, deprives the exhaled tobacco fumes of all their bactericidal or disinfecting properties.