cholera. He found his brother dead, did not see the body, and, having taken some luncheon, with a small tumbler of brandy and water, the water being from Broad Street, left the house in twenty minutes. He died of cholera next day at Pentonville. In one street, assigned to Dr. Snow by the committee special investigation, he found that, of its fourteen houses, the only four which escaped without a death were those in which the Broad Street water was never used, whereas it had been more or less used in the other ten. for The street assigned to me by the committee, though I more or less investigated every street in St. Luke's district, was Broad Street. Any one who has ever been engaged in a similar investigation will at once understand the peculiar advantages for such a purpose of a position which enabled me to choose my own time and opportunity for visiting each house. In most of the Broad Street houses, every floor, and in some every room, contained a separate family. It was, therefore, in many cases not enough to take the word of the groundfloor people with regard to the habits of a house. Each family had to be visited, and, as far as possible, each member of it to be conversed with. In order to accomplish this, it was necessary to visit the same house, and often the same family, several times. On the occasion of each visit, the people would, for the most part, as I had been with them during the outbreak, themselves turn the conversation to the cholera. I was thus able, without obtrusiveness, to examine and cross-examine them, and to check the evidence of one witness by that of another. In this way I collected a great number of facts concerning the habits both of the deceased and the survivors, making a point of letting scarcely a day pass without gaining some information, which I recorded, tabulated, and pondered over, every evening. If the street had not been deserted after the outbreak by more than half of its population, I should probably have learned something concerning the habits of almost every one of its 896 inhabi tants. As it was, I followed many of them to their new abodes, sometimes a long way off, and finally succeeded in obtaining more or less information respecting nearly 500 persons resident in Broad Street at the time of the pestilence. I then drew up a report, of which, omitting some points already brought forward, I here give Mr. Marshall's epitome : "It is shown by this evidence-1st. That of the 90 fatal attacks among the resident population of Broad Street, 84 took place between 31st August and 6th September; 56 between 31st August and 2d September; and 50 on September 1st and 2d. 2d. That of the 90 deceased persons, 45 positively drank the well-water shortly before illness; and that of only 13 altogether is it at all confidently said that they did not drink it. Moreover, that of the abovementioned 84, the non-use of the water is asserted of only 8; and of the 56 persons attacked between 31st August and 2d September, it is positively affirmed of only 2 that they did not drink this water. 3rd. That undoubtedly, of 100 persons residing in Broad Street, who were attacked with cholera or diarrhoa (including dead and surviving), 80 drank the water, whilst 20 are affirmed not to have drunk it; whereas out of 336 persons living in that street, and who were not attacked with either disease, only 57 had drunk the water, whilst 279 had not. 4th. That there is a great probability that the numerical proportions were even more remarkable than this, all cases involved in any doubt having been rejected. (5th and 6th referred to the factories and brewery.) 7th. That, of 97 persons residing in 10 houses, in which no attack occurred, 87 did not drink the water at all, whilst the remainder did not drink it at the height of the outbreak, or drank it either in small quantities or mixed with spirits. 8th. That in a great number of particular instances, related at length, the evidence of an injurious influence exercised by the water becomes strengthened as the inquiry becomes more strict and search ing. 9th. That the want of good sanitary arrangements in certain houses operated by compelling the residents to resort to the pump for drinking-water; and that, on the contrary, in certain instances where the drains were in good order, the cisterns were clean, and the inhabitants did not send to the pump. 10th. That through the district generally the aged and infirm, when isolated, escaped, not merely because they had more house accommodation, but because they did not use the water, having no one to send for it." In estimating the drift of the evidence, of which the above is only a brief abstract, particular attention must be paid to the statement that "of the "56 inhabitants of Broad Street fatally "attacked between the 31st August and "2d September, it is positively affirmed. "of only 2 that they did not drink this "water." Not that it is certain that the rest all did drink it; but that of only 2 was it said, with any degree of certainty, that they did not. Before August 31st there had been three fatal attacks in this street, viz. one on the 12th, one on the 28th, and one on the 30th, which was about the proportion of cases that might be expected in such a street during an epidemic. Concerning the drinking of water in the first of these cases, I could learn nothing; but in the other two cases the non-use of the pump water was clearly established. The case on the 30th was that of a boy who had just come from Bayswater, and whose mother and sister also died of cholera at Bayswater. The case on the 28th is one which will presently assume some importance. But meanwhile I pass on to notice that, whilst of the 56 or (including workpeople) 84 cases in Broad Street on August 31st and September 1st and 2d, it was only in 2 that the non-use of this water was positively affirmed, yet in the remaining 31 between September 2d and 9th, the non-use of it was as positively affirmed in 9 cases, 3 of which were the only cases that occurred after September 6th. After the 9th cholera and diarrhoea disappeared from the street. Thus it appears thst, whilst the ininfluence of the well-water was paramount among the causes of cholera for three days, it is not traceable at all before those three days, and after them becomes less and less traceable day by day. Now if cholera be, as seems now to be admitted, in some way communicable from one person to another, and if, to borrow a term from the cattle plague commissioners, there be a period of "incubation," the above facts may be accounted for, especially if there be reason to believe that the well-water soon but gradually became innocuous. Pending further explanation, presently to be given, I will state the case provisionally. During a cholera epidemic in a large city, for reasons which, as an investigator of the one determining cause of a concentrated outbreak, I need not be able to ascertain, any street is liable, as I have shown Broad Street to have been, to desultory inroads from cholera; and one patient may communicate the disease to other people who approach him, owing, on Dr. Snow's hypothesis, to their accidentally swallowing, in any of various conceivable ways, ever so minute a portion of his evacuations. In a well-regulated house, where the patient can be isolated, and where those who nurse him are careful to wash their hands, the risk of such an accident need not be very great. But when, as is too often the case, a whole family is huddled together to eat, drink, and sleep in a single room, with no great facilities for ablution, then the risk is great; which will account for all that is urged, and rightly urged, respecting the influence of bad sanitary arrangements upon the propagation of cholera. But it does not account for those startling outbreaks which indiscriminately strike down people of every class and condition. For such outbreaks there is required an agent which can freely convey the poison even into wellregulated houses. And in searching for this agent, we are reduced to decide between air and water. But the atmospheric theory always breaks down in the face of positive and seemingly reliable evidence to the contrary. The sides of the well had been examined, and declared, in a report made by order of the Paving Board on November 27th, 1854, "free from any fissures or "other communication with drains or sewers by which such matters could possibly be conveyed into the waters." Both chemical and microscopical analysis had "failed to detect anything which "could be pronounced peculiar to a "cholera period, or capable of acting as the "anomalies" and "eccentricities," I have to state, with respect to the 10th clause of the above epitome, that the anomaly there explained was mentioned by me, without knowledge of its secondary cause, from St. Luke's pulpit on September 8th, when I congratulated the poor old women, who formed a considerable portion of the congregation, upon their remarkable immunity from the pestilence. At that time I had been too busy to meddle with hypotheses, and had not even heard of Dr. Snow's bill of indictment against the pump. no The escape of these women, many of whom, living alone, had " one to send". to the well, was one of those "eccentricities" which found their best explanation in the pump theory. I should have liked to trace these so-called eccentricities through the "particular instances" mentioned in clause 8. But I must pass on to a subject of more pressing importance, viz. What after all was the matter with the well? Now one of the strangest facts in connexion with this inquiry is, that the impurity of the well water was, in point of time, the very last discovery made by the investigators. We collected the evidence already described, not only in ignorance of the fact of the well having been contaminated, but in a predisposing, co-operating, or specifie "agent in the production of that disease." We stand exonerated, therefore, from the imputation of seeking to impugn the well-water, as accountable for the outbreak, on the ground of any previous knowledge of its impurity. Indeed, for my part, as I have sufficiently shown, I had a leaning the other way. And well I might have such a leaning, having myself drunk a little of this water, cold with brandy, on the evening of September 3d. On that day, we now see, it was less injurious than it had been; otherwise, as I found from other cases, brandy would not have neutralised the effects of the water when taken cold, though of course it diminished the quantity. In spite of my original bias, however, I went on collecting the evidence, until, at the very close of my inquiries, I accidentally lighted on a fact which led to further examination of the well, and to the excavation of the soil between the well and the nearest house. From this examination there resulted the following disclosure. Old fashioned, flat-bottomed, its mortar-joints perishing, its brickwork decayed, the main drain from the house entered the sewer at the top instead of at the bottom, thereby dispensing with the usual fall, and facilitating the premature exit of fluid through its sieve-like sides. Congenial appendage to such a drain, a cesspool, intended for a trap, but misconstructed, was discovered in the front area, with other abominations, unmolested by water, which I forbear to recite. The cesspool, of course, rivalled the drain in the disreputable state of its brick work, the bricks admitting of being lifted from their beds without using the least force. The continuous passage of fluid through the sides of the cesspool being thus provided for, similar arrangements for its overflow presented themselves to the notice of the investigators, in the shape of a covering of saturated rotten boards. In close proximity both to drain and cesspool-its water-line but eight feet of vertical depth below the bottom level of the cesspool-two feet eight inches the horizontal distance between its outer brickwork and the drain-stood the Broad Street well. I need scarcely dilate upon the "washed appearance of ground and gravel"channelled furrows observable from "inside the well-black saturated 66 swampy soil"-in order to prove that the same policy which had long used the Thames for a sewer, had at least in one case made a cesspool of a well. If I have said anything in this paper which appears to militate against the views of those who connect filth with cholera, I trust that I have now made amends, having furnished them with an additional argument for urging the disuse of the London surface wells, which from their very nature are, as our report alleged, "not only liable to 66 special contamination, but subject to "constant, unavoidable, and habitual 66 impurity." And yet, strange to say, they are held in great repute. It is a fact that the Broad Street pump could boast a metropolitan reputation. It has been said, I know not with what truth, that its water was specially selected to sparkle in a once celebrated "nectar." Its reputation is explained by Mr. Marshall as having been "partly due to "its low temperature, to the quantity of "carbonic acid contained in it, and to "the saline matter preventing its de"composition until after it had free access to the air." 66 It only remains that I should relate the circumstance which led to further examination of the well, and to the excavation of the surrounding soil. There were, as I have stated, three cases of cholera in Broad Street before the 31st of August, on the evening of which day the great outbreak began. In consequence of Dr. Snow's suggestions, I made particular inquiries respecting the two persons seized on August 12th and 30th. But both these cases had been in houses too far removed from the well to affect it otherwise than through the sewer, which, being a new sewer, seemed very unlikely to leak. As to the first cases on August 31st, they were so nearly simultaneous as to preclude the notion of their having been otherwise connected with each other than as having a common origin. But, singularly enough, I at first overlooked the case of August 28th; or, rather, I had recorded only the date of death, September 2d. I can only account for my not having inquired particularly into this case by the fact of its having been that of an infant; and I had not supposed that any one who died in Broad Street on the 2d of September had been ill for several days. One day, however, whilst searching a file of the Registrar's returns for another purpose, I came on the following entry "At 40, Broad Street, 2d Septem"ber, a daughter, aged five months: "exhaustion, after an attack of diarrhoea "four days previous to death." From my familiarity with the street, I knew that this was the house immediately facing the pump. So I hastened off at once to the house, and ascertained from the mother, who occupied the back parlour, that the child was attacked on August 28th, and that the dejections at first were abundant, but ceased on the 30th. In answer to further questions, she told me that the dejections were collected in napkins, which, on being removed, were immediately steeped in pails, the water from which was poured partly into a sink in the back yard, and partly into a cesspool in the front area. Being struck with the dangerous proximity of this cesspool to the pumpwell, I communicated the facts to the committee, who forthwith ordered an investigation to be made; with what result has already been described. Now if this child's dejections did the mischief, it is easy to see, as they ceased on August 30th, how so shallow a well may have purified itself in a few days, especially as the cholera patients drank its water copiously, some of them at the rate of four gallons a day! But it is not so easy to see why the mischief was not prolonged by further contamination of this water from subsequent cases in the same house. Certainly it may be suggested that the well may have killed off most of its habitual drinkers in the first few days of the outbreak, leaving only non-drinkers and those who were proof against its influence. But that is not a satisfactory hypothesis. A better explanation perhaps may be found in the fact of three of the subsequent cases having occurred in the upper back rooms, where there was a great temptation, in the confusion of the moment, to throw the evacuations out of the windows into the yard, which I ascertained was in one case actually done. And the fifth and last case in this house, which was that of the father of the infant, occurred on September 8th, the very day on which the handle of the pump was removed. Of course there arose considerable discussion among the doctors as to the precise nature of the child's illness, some contending that its diarrhoea was not choleraic; an opinion which is entitled to the more respect from its having been that of the doctor who attended the child. The committee, therefore, did not pledge themselves to the conclusion that the outbreak was due to this case. But this much, at any rate, may be affirmed, that, whatever uncertainty there may be about the nature of infantine diarrhoea, the plain fact of the child's dejections having been poured into a cesspool (the connexion between which and the pump-well is clearly established) for a period of three days immediately preceding a great outbreak, the phenomena of which point decidedly to the pump as its origin, is indeed a very remarkable coincidence. CRADOCK NOWELL: A TALE OF THE NEW FOREST. BY RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE. CHAPTER XXXI. WHEN Miss Rosedew and her niece came in to get ready for dinner, Amy cried out suddenly, "Oh, only look at the roses, aunt; how they have opened to-day! What delicious Louise Odier, and just look at General Jacqueminot! and I do declare Jules Margottin is finer than he was at Midsummer. I must cut a few, for I know quite well there will come a great frost if I don't, and then where will all my loves be?" Amy's prediction about the weather was as random a guess as we may find in great authorities, who are never right, although they give the winds sixteen points of the thirty-two to shuffle in. But it so turned out that the girl was right-a point of the compass never hit till a day too late by our weatherclerks. That very same night such a frost set in as had not been known in October for very nearly a century. It lasted nine nights and eight days; the mercury twice fell more than half-way from the freezing point to zero, and the grass was crisp in the shade all day, though the high sun wiped off the whiteness at noon wherever he found the way to it. Boys rejoiced, and went mitching, to slide on the pools of the open furzery: no boys since the time of their great grandfathers had done the heel-tap in October. But the birds did not appreciate it. What in the world did it mean? Why, there were the hips not ripe yet, and the hollyberries come to no colour, and half the blackberries still too acid, |