of the water supplies so filtered are to be found abroad. There is not enough of “practical politics” in filter beds to charm the traditional alderman of our cities. It is now clearly proven that a species of bacteria is uniformly present in pulmonary consumption. This bacillus is to be found in the material coughed up by those who are ill with that disease. It has considerable tenacity of life; the expectorated material can be dried, pulverized into dust, and carried about on the wind; should the bacteria so dried and carried find a proper soil, they can grow and reproduce the disease. Fortunately, a combination of circumstances is required for the contraction of this disease, or it would be far more prevalent than it is. Notwithstanding, it already claims more victims than any other single disease. What has sanitary science done for its repression? It is attempting, in a tentative way, to obtain a registration of those who are consumptives, in order to teach them to avoid being possible sources of infection; to disinfect the discharges carrying the bacteria, and at times the rooms occupied by the consumptives. In Rome, for example, the services of the public disinfectors are asked for as eagerly for the room occupied by a consumptive as for one that had been used by a person suffering from diphtheria. In New York city, where the department of health has been exercising an oversight and care over the consumptives, there has been a constantly diminishing death-rate from all tubercular diseases from 1886, when the rate was 4.42, to 1897, when it was 2.85, with the single exception of 1894, which was lower than 1895. It is too soon to predict the result, but the proper care of consumptives promises much to check the ravages of the disease. [Illustration: SAND FILTER BED.] One of the charms connected with the great results indicated is the simplicity of the methods employed to bring them about. While complex schemes and elaborate machinery may be necessary whenever the amount of service to be rendered requires organization and division of labor to properly accomplish the desired results, the principles are such that they can be executed in the smallest hamlet, and with the very crudest paraphernalia. The two great weapons of the sanitarian in fighting disease are isolation and disinfection. Dr. Henry M. Baker, the efficient secretary of the State Board of Health of Michigan, has for years collected and tabulated the results of the observing and non-observing of these precautions in his State. He has a happy faculty for graphically presenting the results. One of his diagrams is presented here and needs no explanation. In very few of these outbreaks could there have been any municipal disinfecting plant or isolating hospital.