Now it might be exceedingly worth while to have one or more reserve Pavilions, with a view to this annual cleaning. If the flooring of polished oiled boards should be found to answer (that it should receive a fair trial is very desirable, as it might result in a material benefit to our Hospitals), it would be doubly useful, when, every third year or so, the oiling and polishing required renewal, to leave the newly-oiled wards empty for a fortnight. An additional week or two would additionally harden and improve the flooring; but a fortnight would suffice. It might also be right to have reserve wards for what must occur every now and then in a Military Hospital, an influx of patients beyond the usual number, or an outbreak of cholera, or some malignant epidemic, which it might be desirable to isolate from the other patients. It may now be confidently expected that, under the new _régime_, the progress in improvement of Military Hospitals will proceed rapidly; that it will be quietly done is almost as certain--real improvement and noisy philanthropy being fearfully inconsistent with each other, especially in that momentous machine called the Army of England, which is no safe plaything. Dr. Helm, the Director of the Vienna General Hospital, in a little pamphlet published some time ago, insists on the importance, in designing a new Hospital, of providing Reserve wards, especially with a view to dangerous epidemics. They should admit, he urges, of easy and complete isolation from all the remaining parts of the building. [Sidenote: Occasional Revision of Rules.] 9. Dr. Esse, Director of the Charité, at Berlin, in a practical and systematic, but pedantic and pudding-headed, little book on Hospitals, published in 1857, strongly urges the importance of occasionally revising and altering the rules of Hospital Officers and servants, and all the Charité instructions end with this proviso of alteration. It is one of our many unavoidable difficulties that it is necessary to begin our work under definite rules, while it is also necessary to consider the service, for some years to come, as tentative and experimental. It is well to bear in mind what cannot be expressed. [Sidenote: Defect in some Systems of Nursing.] 10. In admiring much, very much about the German Hospitals, it becomes necessary not to omit a warning. A number of women, all equal among themselves, with no female Superior or Superiors whatever, under the sole control of men, in an ascending scale from the Abtheilungs-Inspectoren or Oberkrankenpfleger, through Doctors of sundry ranks, to the Director himself, such is the system followed, as in the great Charité Hospital at Berlin, so in the great General Hospital at Vienna; and this cardinal mistake leads to many others. [Sidenote: Nurses’ Exercise.]