Typhoid fever, also known as enteric and gastric fever, is thus known to be produced, and its germs to breed, amongst the insanitary conditions represented by foul drains and collections of filth wherever found. Experience amply proves that by attention to those labours which have for their object the secure trapping of drains, flushing of sewers, and abolition of all filth-heaps, the chances of this fever being produced are greatly decreased. It has also been shown that even where this fever has obtained a hold, attention to drains and like conditions has resulted in the decrease of the epidemic. Again, typhus fever is notoriously a disease affecting the over-crowded, squalid, and miserable slums of our great cities. Unlike typhoid fever, which equally affects the palace of the prince and the cottage of the peasant, typhus fever is rarely found except in the courts and alleys of our great cities. We know that the germs of this fever, which in past days constituted the ‘Plague’ and the ‘Jail Fever’ of John Howard’s time, breed and propagate amongst the foul air which accumulates in the ill-ventilated dwellings of the poor. Attention to ventilation, personal cleanliness, and the removal of all conditions which militate against the ordinary health of crowded populations, remove the liability to epidemics of this fever. Again, the disease known as ague has almost altogether disappeared from this and other countries through the improved drainage of the land; though it still occasionally lingers in the neighbourhood of swamps and in other situations which are wet and damp, and which favour the decay of vegetable matter. Man holds in his own hands the power both of largely increasing and decreasing his chances of early death, and nowhere is this fact better exemplified than in the lessened mortality which follows even moderate attention to the laws of health; the words of Dr Farre deserve to be emblazoned in every household in respect of their pungent utterance concerning the good which mankind is able to effect by even slight attention to sanitary requirements. ‘The hygienic problem,’ says Dr Farre, ‘is how to free the English people from hereditary disease ... and to develop in the mass the athletical, intellectual, æsthetical, moral, and religious qualities which have already distinguished some of the breed. There is a divine image in the future, to which the nation must aspire. The first step towards it is to improve the health of the present age; and improvement, if as persistently pursued as it is in the cultivation of inferior species, will be felt by their children and their children’s children. A slight development for the better in each generation, implies progress in the geometrical progression which yields results in an indefinite time, that if suddenly manifested would appear miraculous.’