The history of the stream at Walbrook is, I believe, not dissimilar; but there is this marked difference between the two cases, that the comparative declivity of the latter district has allowed its soil to acquire a dryness and healthiness which have never been reached on the banks of the Fleet. For, owing to the extreme lowness of level in this district, the tidal influence of the Thames is very inconveniently felt; the cellars of houses are habitually exposed to dampness, even to flooding; and probably the whole porous sub-soil, at least as far north as your jurisdiction extends, is maintained in a sodden and malarious state. With respect to the second part of the City in which considerable groups of cholera cases were observed, it has a not dissimilar peculiarity. I refer to that northern part of the City which extends (on the other side of London Wall) from Bishopsgate to Aldersgate. The epidemic prevailed there with far less severity than in the Fleet district, but still with a preference which easily shows itself in a cholera-map. At the intersection of Whitecross-street by Beech-lane, in a space that the point of one’s finger would hide in Wyld’s large map, there were 12 deaths: in that small portion of the City which lies north of Barbican and Beech-street there were 40 deaths: in the immediate vicinity of Half-moon-street, Bishopsgate, 60 deaths, of which more than half were in the workhouse. Now, certainly, in all this space (and probably still further in both directions, east and west) without the former gates of the City, there is a marked local character. It is a reclaimed marsh.[42] Throughout this district, in the olden times of the City, there lay (says Stow) ‘a moorish rotten ground, unpassable but for cawswaies purposely made to that intent;’ and one reads how ‘divers dikes were cast, and made to drein the waters of the said Moorefields, with bridges arched over them, whereby the said field was made somewhat more commodious, but yet it stood full of noisome waters;’ till gradually ‘by divers sluces was this fenne or moore made maine and hard ground, which before, being overgrowne with flagges, sedges, and rushes, served to no use;’ while ‘the farther grounds beyond Finsbury Court were so over-heightened with laystalls of dung, that divers windmills were thereon set, the ditches were filled up, and the bridges overwhelmed.’