Reliable data concerning the construction of sewers were not obtainable in the United States until long after the close of the Civil War. In 1857, when Julius W. Adams was commissioned to prepare plans for sewering the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., which at that time covered an area of 20 square miles, a great proportion of which was suburban territory, the engineering profession was wholly without data of any kind to guide in proportioning sewers for the drainage of cities and towns. The half century intervening since that time, however, has seen the development of sanitary engineering and witnessed the installation of sewer system, rightly proportioned and properly designed, in almost every city, town and village in the United States, while text books on engineering contain all necessary data for their design and construction. It must not be inferred from the foregoing statement that sewers were unknown in the United States prior to the construction of the Brooklyn sewer system. There was one in Boston, for example, which dated from the seventeenth century, while the first comprehensive sewerage project was designed by E. S. Chesbrough, for the city of Chicago in 1855. There was no great activity in sewer building in this country thirty years ago. Up to that time most of the cities were comparatively small, and no thought was given by the various municipalities to treating the combined sewage as a whole. The conditions were ripe, however, for some unusual event to crystallize public opinion and focus attention on the subject, and the event was furnished by the city of Memphis, Tennessee. Ever since 1740, Memphis had been known as a particularly unhealthful city, where the death rate was abnormally high, and epidemic after epidemic of cholera, yellow fever and other contagious diseases had scourged the inhabitants. So common had those events become, that they were accepted as incident to living in the locality, and were looked upon as special visitations which could not be avoided. Such was the state of affairs when an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in 1879, which caused a death list of 5,150, and was followed the succeeding year by a further death roll of 485, due to the scourge. Had the disease been confined within the boundaries of the city, it is possible that little would have been thought of the matter outside of the state of Tennessee. However, refugees, fleeing in all directions, carried the dread disease with them, until a strict quarantine—a shotgun quarantine—confined the infection to a certain circumscribed area. In the meantime, interference with railroad traffic, armed forces guarding the borders of neighboring states, together with the fear of the dread disease spreading all over the country, brought Congress and the public to a realization of the necessity for doing something to stamp out the disease. The most practical good accomplished by the agitation was the