Every threatening of rheumatism, therefore, is to be watched with the most anxious care, since so serious a complication as disease of the heart may accompany extremely slight general symptoms. It is wise too, to place any child in whom general feverish symptoms come on at once under medical observation, for though it does not usually happen, yet it does sometimes occur, that rheumatic inflammation attacks the heart before any other local signs of the malady have manifested themselves. It is scarcely necessary to add that tenfold precautions are needed when rheumatism has once occurred, since the liability to its return is very great, and the heart which escaped in the first attack may suffer in the second; or the comparatively small mischief done the first time may become an incurable disorder. =Ague.=--_Intermittent fever_ or _ague_ is very rare in childhood in London; or at any rate it is very rare among children of the wealthier classes. I believe it is everywhere rarer among children than among grown persons, probably because they are as a rule less exposed to those malarious influences which produce it. In the child it generally takes the form of tertian ague, that is to say the attack recurs every second day; one day of freedom intervening between two attacks. The three stages of shivering, heat, and sweating are less marked in the child than in the grown person, and this indistinctness of its symptoms is greater in proportion to the tenderer age of the child. Shivering is scarcely ever well-marked, a condition of unaccountable depression usually taking its place, while once or twice I have known convulsions occur which gave rise to the apprehension that disease of the brain existed. The hot stage is long, and passes off gradually without the profuse perspiration that occurs in the grown person, and the child even between the attacks is almost always more or less ailing. A first and even a second attack may puzzle not the parents only, but also the doctor; but after the symptoms have returned a few times, the child being neither better nor worse in the intervals, it becomes evident that no serious disease is impending. The risk of an overhasty conclusion is that the depression and disturbance of the nervous system may be supposed to imply the existence of brain disease; and lead to unsuitable treatment, instead of the administration of quinine, which nine times out of ten proves a specific for ague. The rapid increase of temperature in the attack, and its equally rapid subsidence afterwards, will, if carefully noted, preserve from error.