If you now look to the disease as it raged within your own jurisdiction, you will observe its fatality in two especial directions. First, in the line I have indicated to you, northward from Blackfriars Bridge, in a band of two or three hundred yards width; _there_, in the parallelogram which lies along the main road, from Stonecutter-street to Bridewell Hospital, were 76 deaths; _there_, in the little clump of houses forming the angle of Farringdon-street and Holborn-hill, were 17 deaths; _there_, in a square space behind twenty-seven shop fronts in Fleet-street, were 57 deaths; _there_, in the small parish of St. Ann’s, Blackfriars, were deaths at the rate of 25 to every thousand of its population. This was incomparably the most afflicted portion of your territory. Those who are acquainted with the ancient geography of the City will readily conjecture a reason; they will remember when ‘the course of water running at London under Old-bourne bridge and Fleet bridge, into the Thames, was of such bredth and depth that ten or twelve ships, navies at once with merchandises, were wont to come to the foresaid bridge of Fleet, and some of them unto Old-bourne bridge;’ they will remember how this broad river (like the Thames of our day) was thronged on both sides with population; how (again like the Thames) it was a draining river, probably with wide banks of putrefying mud; how many fruitless attempts were made to cleanse and preserve its channel; but how (in Stow’s day) ‘the brooke, by meanes of continuall incrochments upon the banks, and casting of soylage into the stream, was become worse cloyed than ever it was before.’ Where that _soylage_ was cast, and where, since the days referred to, so many habitations have arisen that no sign of stream remains visible to the wayfarer above ground, its traces still remain below. Throughout at least a large portion of this district, the sub-soil (your Surveyor informs me) consists of black mud, the bed of the ancient river, in which are set the foundations of the modern houses. The river, which centuries ago fulfilled for a large population those vile uses which now pollute the Thames, has gradually yielded its foul banks to the residence of a growing population; and the sanitary relations of that population are exactly such as might be imitated, if the volume of the Thames were henceforth slowly reduced, and if those banks of mud which are now exposed only at low water, were simultaneously converted into the site of permanent habitations.