Every year thousands of children and invalids of New York receive improper nourishment, or are made positively sick, on milk that is either foul, stale, or ready to sour; and every summer thousands of children die from complaints traceable to this source. Swill milk is one of the great generators of disease-producing germs to which all sorts of “complaints” are due. Does the Board of Health care a fig for the generator? No; the Board is absorbed in watching the antics of the germs! Mighty intellects are searching for malignant, multitudinous mites. Yet there are just a few mites of common sense in existence, which if encouraged will breed quite as fast as the sinister ones. Indeed, there must be one or two at work in myself, for I seem to be urged to say that if our City and State Boards of Health should see to it that our cows are kept clean and healthy, our milk clean and pure, our cans clean and well scoured, and our shops and ice-boxes clean and free from odor, there would be no occasion for germ cultures of diseases brought on by swill milk. Our milk example will illustrate what germs of common sense would do to ward off all kinds of disease-producing micro-organisms. Rigorous regulations, well enforced, as indicated above, would work in other lines as well. And when the source is gone sinister microbes will not come into existence, and diseases that have resulted from such microbes will have gone into innocuous desuetude. There should be a bath-tub and a water-closet in every suite of sleeping apartments. When this is the case, there will be a larger number of persons clean internally and externally, and the doctors will be on a hunt for health-producing germs instead of disease-producing ones. Let us start an organized movement in this direction. Last summer Medical Science went about killing mosquitoes on Staten Island with a little spraying apparatus, and managed to disturb the pest for a day or two from its customary bivouac. Christian Science stood aloof and smiled superciliously, claiming that “there aren’t any such things as mosquitoes; but if they should prove to exist, there isn’t any malaria anyhow.” Good sense might have suggested to Medicus the draining of the ponds for gardening purposes; and, if that were not possible, the filling in of the edges and the making of deep-water lakes for the sport-loving youth, who might be depended on to keep the water stirred up by boating, etc., free of charge, and thus convert a pest pond into a pleasure lake. Pleasure and cleanliness are taxed to-day for disease and pests. Oh, human imbecility! As to public baths, there are so many objections to them that I cannot touch on the subject in this chapter. But let me impress upon the health-seeker, the public-spirited citizen, and our city officials that what we urgently need are ample conveniences in our homes for internal and external cleanliness--conveniences easily accessible several times a day, every day of the year.