Next, the disease was rumoured to be in London. Hope and belief are too near akin for this not to have been doubted and denied; but the last few weeks have shown, with sad incontrovertible certainty, that after only four years absence, Cholera has again obtained its footing on our soil. Six or seven hundred deaths, registered in the metropolis since the beginning of September, have already attested its presence. Anxiously adverting to the future, and asking what may be the onward progress of the disease, we can appeal only to a narrow experience. Before us lie the records of but two complete visitations of the disease, and the commencement of this, the third. It would be a shallow philosophy that should pretend, from two observations, to predict the possible orbit of this obscurely wandering plague. Yet I dare not disguise from you that such knowledge as we have, to justify scientific anticipation, is pregnant with threats and gloom. For--let me remind you of the past. At each former period of attack, the infection, after a certain course over Continental Europe, struck upon our eastern coast in the summer of an unforgotten year. In the northern parts of Great Britain, so soon as it had lit among the population, each time it burst forth into explosive activity, and worked its full measure of destruction without delay. More faintly it reached the South. On each occasion, indeed, at the close of summer, London was sensibly affected by the disease; but, we hoped, under a milder infliction. Here and there, within its Bills of Mortality (as at Tooting in 1848) there was thrown some astounding flash on a particular hot-bed of co-operating poison; but on the whole it seemed to the sanguine, on each occasion, that the fury of the epidemic was expending itself in our northern towns, and that the metropolis was to be comparatively spared. Each time, at the commencement of the new year, our London mortality from Cholera seemed stationary within the limit of a few hundred deaths. Each time winter and spring allowed a long respite to our invaded City, and confirmed the omens of the hopeful. But each time there was disappointment. Each time, as the warmth of summer requickened the exterior conditions of chemical activity, the dormant fire kindled afresh--slowly at first, but with speedy acceleration of rate. Each time, in the few weeks before Michaelmas--amid almost universal threatenings of the disease, and amid such panic of death as the metropolis had not known since the Great Plague, there suddenly fell many thousands of the population.