The chief dangers which threaten rural inhabitants are those arising from polluted drinking water. This is infected from the household excrement and barnyard drainage, as will be described farther on, and its use leads in the main to bowel disturbances, typhoid-fever, and dysenteric affections. It might be claimed that in an isolated homestead the danger is absent because the night soil from the healthy household can not contain the germs of typhoid-fever, and, therefore, the well water can not receive them from leaky cesspools and surface drainage. This would be true if the family lived secluded from other human beings. As the case stands, there is much more communication than is at first thought supposed. There is more or less coming and going of farm hands and other hired help, of tramps, peddlers, etc. The farmer travels more than formerly. He frequently visits neighboring communities. The children go to school. As it has been shown that there may be mild cases of typhoid-fever passing unnoticed, in a farm hand, for example, who leaves on account of ill health, perhaps, and who has meanwhile, in his discharges, deposited the germs of this disease on the premises, it is evident that isolation nowadays does not exist except in remote, thinly settled regions, and that disease germs may make themselves suddenly felt in an unexpected manner in any farmhouse. There are other important reasons, however, why rural sanitation should not be neglected. The health of the large communities of people who draw their food supply from the country is in a measure dependent on the health of the farming community. There is scarcely a city child who is not, in a degree, dependent for its health on the sanitary conditions prevailing in the house of the dairyman. Milk has been repeatedly shown to be the means of distributing typhoid-fever and other diseases. Any vegetable foods from the farm eaten raw are liable to become carriers of infection under unsanitary conditions. In many parts of our country other causes operate in making the health of many people depend on the proprieties of country homes. The thousands of city people, who flock every summer to the country and bring to the farming community considerable sums of money, should be properly protected against the dangers of polluted water and infected milk by the adoption of suitable methods of sewage disposal. Too frequently those who left the city for the purpose of gaining strength by breathing pure air, drinking pure water, and eating pure food, only return with the germs of an often fatal disease within them to swell the typhoid statistics of our large cities. DISPOSAL OF SEWAGE. The vital thing which thus presents itself is the disposal of fecal matter and other refuse so that the wells, upon which most rural families depend for their drinking water, may remain pure. To this matter we will first turn our attention.