_Pneumonia._—While there has been a remarkable diminution in the prevalence of a large number of all the acute infections, one disease not only holds its own, but seems even to have increased in its virulence. In the mortality bills, pneumonia is an easy second to tuberculosis. It attacks particularly the intemperate, the feeble, and the old, though every year a large number of robust, healthy individuals succumb. So frequent is pneumonia at advanced periods of life that to die of it has been said to be the natural end of old men in this country. In many ways, too, it is a satisfactory disease, if one may use such an expression. It is not associated with much pain, except at the onset, the battle is brief and short, and a great many old persons succumb to it easily and peacefully. We know the cause of the disease; we know only too well its symptoms, but the enormous fatality (from twenty to twenty-five per cent.) speaks only too plainly of the futility of our means of cure, and yet in no disease has there been so great a revolution in treatment. The patient is no longer drenched to death with drugs, or bled to a point where the resisting powers of nature are exhausted. We are not without hope, too, that in the future an antidote may be found to the toxins of the disease, and of late there have been introduced several measures of great value in supporting the weakness of the heart, a special danger in the old and debilitated. _Hydrophobia._—Rabies, a remarkable, and in certain countries a widespread, disease of animals, when transmitted to a man by the bite of rabid dogs, wolves, etc., is known as hydrophobia. The specific germ is unknown, but by a series of brilliant observations Pasteur showed (1) that the poison has certain fixed and peculiar properties in connection with the nervous system; (2) that susceptible animals could be rendered refractory to the disease, or incapable of taking it, by a certain method of inoculation; and (3) that an animal unprotected and inoculated with a dose of the virus sufficient to cause the disease may, by the injection of proper anti-rabic treatment, escape. Supported by these facts, Pasteur began a system of treatment of hydrophobia in man, and a special institute was founded in Paris for the purpose. When carried out promptly the treatment is successful in an immense majority of all cases, and the mortality in persons bitten by animals proved to be rabid, who have subsequently had the anti-rabic treatment, has been reduced to less than one-half per cent. The disease may be stamped out in dogs by careful quarantine of suspected animals, and by a thoroughly carried out muzzling order.