What of the great invalid corp that register their physical afflictions under the comprehensive term “poor health,” and who seem to have no specific disease, either acute or chronic? What demon has laid so oppressive a burden upon the nerve centres that half of life’s function is smothered, and the physical energies nearly blotted out? I believe that contaminated water is one of the prime factors in this unfortunate and distressing aggregate. We have often traced typhoid fever, dysentery, and other diseases to a polluted well or spring; but the cause of insidious decay, progressive pallor, softening muscles, wasting strength, and slow enervation is not so readily found nor so zealously sought after. That contaminated water should produce such results, associated perhaps with other unsanitary surroundings, there can be no argument to disprove. A close study of the subject for the past two years has led me to believe that polluted wells are a most prolific source of sickness and death throughout the state. I believe the medical profession is not yet so thoroughly aroused upon this subject as the facts demand, and that if the physicians of the state should carefully investigate the question of water pollution, the result would be one of wide-spread alarm at the ravages it is producing. By far the most dangerous source of water supply is the well, because of its close proximity to dwellings. If the surroundings of a well are not free from all impurities and waste, we have no right to expect pure water, and an attack of typhoid fever, dysentery, or kindred diseases should not in the least astonish us. _Conditions which endanger our wells are the rule and not the exception, both in the sparsely settled country and in the city._ In a speech before the Central N. Y. Medical Association in 1875, Dr. Harvey Jewett said,—