Lastly, after washing down with perchloride do not lime-wash or attempt in any way to employ these agents in any combination, as to do so shows a pitiable ignorance, not only of the Board School rudiments of chemistry, but of the behaviour of the specific germ of plague to external surroundings. I am perfectly aware that the combination is ordered in several sets of Indian regulations, but in justice to the service to which I have had the honour to belong, I hope my readers will accept my assurance that these ludicrous recommendations are one of the natural results of the meddling of ignorant amateurs, military and civilian, who unfortunately have often been allowed to assume the command of sanitary matters within our great bureaucratic dependency. If the inhabitants of infected houses can be induced to migrate for a time into camp, so much the better, as in such cases the enormous additional disinfecting powers of air and light can be utilised by removing, for a time, portions of the tiling or thatch, and it must be remembered also that time alone is also an excellent disinfectant. The danger they run in immediately returning should be clearly pointed out, but if return they will, they must be let do so, as compulsion means opposition, and the benefit of the disinfection to the general community is only lessened by their return in so far that should they fall victims to their own rashness they form fresh foci of infection and the process has to be gone over again. In the case of small compact communities, such as gangs of coolies working under commercial corporations, a more autocratic course of action is, of course, practicable, but should never be carried to such an extent as to bring about organised opposition, and however stupid and prejudiced they may appear to the ordinary European mind, no effort should be spared to obtain the co-operation of the people themselves, and it is in securing this that the personal element of long association and mutual trust is especially valuable. In spite of the great advances in our knowledge of the disease that have been made during the present recrudescence of the disease, we are still a great deal in the dark on many points, and especially as to the mechanism of infection in the majority of cases. Each year of the progress of the epidemic demolishes some one or other of the few standpoints of certainty that we had imagined as firmly established, and it is evident that some great discovery remains to be made before plague will cease to be, from many points of view, an almost complete mystery. SMALL-POX.