CONDITIONS INFLUENCING PREVALENCE 201 



When travelling by rail during the rains in India, nothing 

 is more common than to see all the country on one side 

 flooded, while the other is comparatively dry. 



On this account railways, like canals, should, as far as 

 possible, be made to follow the water-shed, and where this 

 is out of the question, the provision of drainage openings 

 should be much more liberal than is usually the case. It 

 must be admitted that the European cannot be held 

 entirely blameless in such matters. Putting aside the 

 relationship of puddles to malaria, the presence of such 

 irregular collections of water has long been recognised as 

 unhealthy, and to say the very least they are untidy, and 

 would not be tolerated in any advanced European country 

 on this last score, if on no other. In countries such as 

 India, our public works should be made standing object- 

 lessons of the superiority of European methods and system. 



To remedy the results of past carelessness would undoubt- 

 edly be extremely costly ; but, in the majority of cases, they 

 might have been entirely avoided by the exercise of a little 

 care and foresight, and that with little or no enhancement 

 of the first cost of the work. The mere fact that the 

 excavation of a continuous ditch, in place of a chain of 

 borrow pits, may endanger a railway embankment by 

 "scouring," shows what efficient drainage cuts they might 

 be made, and further conclusively demonstrates how badly 

 they must be needed. Engineers, moreover, admit that for 

 one embankment that succumbs to " scouring," a score 

 collapse from the mere water-logging of their foundations 

 in time of flood, so that the neglect to favour efficient drain- 

 age in every possible way can hardly be defensible, even 

 from a strictly technical point of view ; and I cannot doubt 

 that the ingenuity of our engineers is fully equal to devis- 

 ing a remedy for the scouring of drainage cuts placed beside 

 embankments, if their provision be once admitted as a 

 necessity. In the case of buildings again, in nine cases out 

 of ten, the earth required for their plinths might be advan- 

 tageously excavated so as to make drainage cuts to the 

 nearest natural line of outfall and so become a source of 

 improvement, instead of damage, but in practice the matter 



