companies insist as a condition of constant service; and not to the exercise of the powers they possess, but do not as a rule employ, to improve the present system by insisting on the due carrying out of the really useful and valuable regulations quoted above. The adoption of this constant system would enable us to get rid of our cisterns, if not altogether, yet so far as the supply of water for culinary use and drinking is concerned. The neglect of cisterns to which I referred above, would then be a matter of less moment; and as the pipes would be always charged, we should be less liable, than we are now, to the contamination of water, for such an accident as I am about to mention would be almost impossible. Complaint was made that the first portion of water entering certain cisterns in a street and mews at Notting Hill, each time the water was turned on, was of a disgusting character; and this happened at a time when there was an obstruction of the sewer in the mews, the effect being to saturate the ground and flood the surface with sewage and surface drainage. I surmised that the main was defective, and that when the water was turned off the sewage was sucked into the pipe to fill the vacuum, and then forced through the service pipes so soon as the water was turned on. It turned out, so I was informed by the Company, that the defect really existed in a service pipe of one of the houses; the effect, however, was the same, and dangerous nuisances of this kind may occur at any time, or in any locality, under similar circumstances, so long as the intermittent system of water supply is continued. In the present instance several cases of illness were traced to this fouling of the water, and had the sewer contained typhoid excreta, the results might have been lamentable in the extreme, and of the same kind as at Over Darwen, and at Lewes during the recent epidemics of Enteric Fever. As I have remarked in another place, we seem as far off as ever from the constant system, the only gleam of hope in respect of it being that the companies have made, and are making extensive preparations, so as to enable them to supply their districts when called on to do so. They are enabled to give a constant supply even though it should not be required of them by the Metropolitan authority, and they would be gainers by so doing, if the prevention of waste is really of any moment to them, which may be reasonably doubted. The Metropolitan authority is the Metropolitan Board of Works, a body which it is well known are unwilling to execute the authority conferred on them by the Act, strongly disapproving, as they do, of the regulations, the stringency of which they did their utmost, but in vain, to modify. MORTUARY.