There is a marked tendency to see-saw between the skin and the mucous membrane of the alimentary canal. During active digestion, when the “splanchnic area” is full of blood, the skin is cold. Hot fomentations, by dilating the vessels of the skin, diminish congestion of the alimentary tract. An inflamed throat is relieved by a compress round the neck. Conversely, it must be admitted that, in certain persons, slight constriction of the vessels of the skin induces inflammation of the mucous membrane. This is one reason for the almost universal dread of draughts. A draught cools a limited area of the skin. Some of us cultivate a love of draughts. They are the sensible evidence of the entrance of fresh air. Yet we admit reluctantly that certain fragile mortals are not altogether fanciful in supposing that a draught may give them a catarrh or a toothache. If asked why they object to draughts, many persons answer that they “are afraid of catching a chill”—carrying us back to the time before the clinical thermometer was invented; to days when the shivering fit, or “rigor,” which first calls attention to the fact that the temperature is already two or three degrees above the normal, was supposed to be the commencement of the illness. The patient imagined that the “chill” caused him to shiver, and that if he had not “caught” it he would not have been ill. The substitution of the term “cold” for “rheum,” naming the malady after one of its prominent symptoms, has done much to perpetuate this superstition. “Chill” is a word we scarcely dare to mention. When doctors could no longer attribute to witchcraft the occurrence of disorders for which they had no other explanation, they invented the luminous theory that inflammatory diseases—especially those of the stomach, liver, and lungs—were produced by “a chill.” At one time all diseases which were not evidently infectious were caused by chill. The discovery of germs and the recognition of their maleficent activity has stripped this cloak of ignorance off almost every case of abnormal tissue-metabolism. It is recognized now that the germ _is_ the disease, not the effects which the germ produces. Pneumonia is impossible in the absence of the pneumococcus, however severe the chill to which the patient was exposed when out in the cold and wet. Consumption is the effect produced by the tubercle bacillus. If there are no bacilli, there can be no consumption. Yet these two diseases illustrate the possibility of the use of the term “chill” without impropriety. The coccus of pneumonia may frequently be found in the mouth of a healthy person. If everyone with whom the tubercle bacillus has at some time come in contact were inevitably its victim, no human being would be free from phthisis, if any still survived. There are conditions of health, or rather of unhealth, in which the economy is less resistant than usual to the germs. Apparently the vaso-motor disturbances of