Another very important point is the disappearance of malaria. Drainage, the filling up of low-lying places, and extensive building operations, have banished malaria from our midst, and this, be it remembered, was not only a cause of death in itself, but probably tended to make other diseases more deadly. It is conceivable that the impregnation of the soil by coal-gas may have helped to stop the growth of noxious microbes which make the soil their habitat. Again, our system of sewers, which has carried filth away from the dwellings, has probably assisted in improving the public health. That sewers have done and are doing much harm as well as good is undoubted, but it is probable that the balance is so far in their favour. For the present typhus fever has disappeared, and this is probably due to two causes--first, the prompt separation of the sick from the healthy, and secondly, to the fact that we have had no scarcity for some years. Typhus is due to overcrowding and want. I have drawn up a scheme which shows by a curve the average price of wheat from the year 1800 to 1886. From this it appears that the staple article of food has, broadly speaking, and with some considerable fluctuation, fallen steadily in price from 1812 to the present time, when it is at its minimum. Not only wheat, but all articles of food and clothing, and also fuel, have of late years been getting steadily cheaper; potatoes and other vegetables are in common use among the masses, and thus we have kept away famine diseases, and also that taint of scurvy, which was undoubtedly a great cause of ill-health in the middle ages. A most important fact has been the removal of the in-take of the water companies to a part of the river containing less sewage than that between the bridges. It is not enough to be able to rejoice in a small death-rate. We ought to be able to look ahead and feel that to the best of our knowledge there is no probability of the return of a high one, and that our sanitary arrangements having been set a-going, will continue _propriâ motu_. We have to remember that diseases disappear or become unimportant, and that others become prominent. In our own day we have seen the rise in importance of diphtheria and enteric fever, and just at present we seem to have lost sight of typhus, for a long time the most important of the febrile diseases. “Leprosy,” which was at one time common in London, has practically disappeared. Plague, sweating sickness, and malarial fever have also gone. Whooping-cough was not recognised till the end of the sixteenth century, and could not, therefore, have been as common as it is now. In like manner, scarlet fever was not distinguished from measles until the seventeenth century, and from that fact we may infer that there could have been no epidemics of it, although we must remember that in the great crowd of fevers it must have been hard to distinguish individuals. The fact that