11>11] on Water Sup2Jly. 101) 



infinitely small organisms. They are the important, almost the 

 only agents of universal hygiene ; they clear away more quickly 

 than the dogs of Constantinople or the wild beasts of the desert 

 the remains of all that has had life, they protect the living against 

 the dead. They do more ; if there are still living beings, if since 

 the hundreds of centuries the world has been inhabited life con- 

 tinues, it is to them we owe it." So, too, it comes about that while 

 the micro-organisms which cause cholera, typhoid, and tubercle, 

 which are so rapidly conveyed to us by means of water, and 

 then exercise their fateful activities, which bring us disease and 

 death — there are beneficent bacteria which " come to succour us 

 who succour want," and these are applied as a bastion or a defence 

 against our enemies by means of the at one time despised sand filter. 

 I think it was Napoleon who said that a wise general should not 

 fight too often with the same enemy, for the enemy was apt to learn 

 too much from his implacable foe. We have fought often with the 

 bacillus of cholera and typhoid, and have learned of our battles. 

 Nothing could be more tragic in the way of instruction than what 

 took place in Hamburg and Altona in 1892. Both Hamburg and 

 Altona are dependent for their water supply on the Elbe, but the 

 intake for the Hamburg supply is above the town ; the intake for 

 the Altona supply is below Hamburg, at a place below the point 

 where the sewage of that town, with its 800,000 inhabitants, is 

 discharged into the river. The Hamburg supply had, therefore, a 

 great initial advantage over that of its neighbouring town. But the 

 cholera epidemic scourged Hamburg, and the Angel of Death passed 

 very lightly over Altona. In Hamburg the deaths from cholera 

 amounted to 1250 in 100,000, and in Altona to only 221 per 100,000 

 of the population. Where the division between the two towns was 

 only the imaginary line down the centre of a street, and the houses 

 on one side of the street, being in Hamburg, were supplied with the 

 above-town water, and the houses on the other side were supplied 

 by the below-town water, the cholera visited with fatal results the 

 houses on the Hamburg side, while those on the Altona side were 

 free from the disease in this new Passover. 



These Laggard statistics are to be accounted for only by the fact 

 that the foul sewage-polluted water of the Elbe which was supplied 

 to Altona was carefully filtered, while the comparatively pure water 

 taken above Hamburg for the supply of that town was not. Altona 

 had the protection of the micro-organisms in its sand filters. 

 Hamburg had no such protection, and suffered accordingly. 



A similar experience in relation to another water-borne disease- — 

 typhoid — has been put on record by the Massachusetts Board of 

 Health. There in 20 years, from 1856 to 1876, the death rate from 

 typhoid in that State was 8*6 per 10,000 of population ; in the years 

 between 1876 and 1895, when private wells had been given up and a 

 public supply of filtered water been substituted, the death rate was 



