Finally, New York has been prevented only by disgraceful civic mismanagement from becoming long ago the healthiest city in the world. In spite of jobbed contracts for street-cleaning, and various corrupt tamperings with the city water-front, by which the currents are obstructed, and injury is done the sewage as well as the channels of the harbor, New York is now undoubtedly a healthier city than any other approaching it in size. Its natural sanitary advantages must be evident. The crying need of a great city is good drainage. To effect this for New York, the civil engineer has no struggle with his material. He need only avail himself dexterously of the original contour of his ground. Manhattan Island is a low outcrop of gneiss and mica-schist, sloping from an irregular, but practically continuous crest, to the Hudson and East Rivers, with a nearly uniform southerly incline from its precipitous north face on the Haarlem and Spuyten Duyvil to high-water mark at the foot of Whitehall Street. Its natural system of drainage might be roughly illustrated by radii drawn to the circumference of a very eccentric ellipse from its northern focus. Wherever the waste of the entire island may descend, it is met by a seaward tide twice in the twenty-four hours. On the East River side the velocity of this tide in the narrow passages is rather that of a mill-stream than of the entrance to a sound. Though less apparent, owing to its area, the tide and current of the Hudson are practically as irresistible. The two branches of the city-sewage, uniting at the Battery, are deflected a little to the westward by Governor's Island, and thus thrown out into the middle of the bay, where they receive the full force of the tidal impulse, retarded by the Narrows only long enough to disengage and drop their finer silt on the flats between Robin's Reef and the Jersey shore. The depurating process of the New World's grandest community lies ready for use in this natural drainage-system. If there be a standing pool, a festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of the city bills of mortality, there is official crime somewhere. Nature must have been fraudulently obstructed in the benignest arrangements she ever made for removing the effete material of a vast city's vital processes. In the matter of climate, New York experiences such comparative freedom from sudden changes as belongs to her position in the midst of large masses of water. She enjoys nearly entire immunity from fogs and damp or chilly winds. Her weather is decided, and her population are liable to no one local and predominant class of disease. So far as her hygienic condition depends upon quantity and quality of food, her communications with the interior give her an exceptional guaranty. Despite the poverty which her lower classes share in kind, though to a much less degree, with those of other commercial capitals, there is no metropolis in the world where the general average of comfort