be true for Munich, but it has not been materially supported in this country; and, in Budapest, Fodor has found that these diseases are more prevalent when the ground water is high. The variations of level in the ground water depend upon such a number of meteorological and other conditions, and give rise to so many and different effects, that even if Pettenkofer's statement be accepted it would not necessarily point to the earth as the natural habitat of the typhoid fever poison. Professor Lane Notter, in his summing up of this ground-water question, says[6]: 'It must, however, be borne in mind that it is not the ground itself which is the cause of the disease, but the impurities in the soil which the varying level of the ground water helps to set in action.' Now, no organic impurity can possibly reach the soil from the subsoil, which is purely inorganic. Any organic impurity which reaches the ground water must, therefore, come from above, and is due in the vast majority of cases to our mismanagement of organic refuse. Dr. Sims Woodhead[7] says that '_the deeper layers_ of the earth are frequently almost entirely free from micro-organisms, _just as is the ground water_.' Of course if the soil of a city be porous, and if there be a subterranean network of sewers interspersed with cesspools, this would (in the high probability that an average proportion of these contrivances leak) constitute a very great danger, but we must not blame the earth because we mismanage it. The earth, be it remembered, is our sole permanent source of wealth, and we must not needlessly quarrel with our bread-and-butter.