114 
Cholera and Enteric fever are also to be attributed to excremental 
or other obnoxious infection. 
I might refer to a few of the chief forms whereby we are apt 
to get filth about us. There are many houses and groups of 
houses—-and I have a considerable share of them in my own 
district—where general slovenliness in everything which relates to 
the removal of refuse-matter, is the local habit; where within a 
short distance of the door of each house, or in spaces common to 
many houses, refuse, which house life, and some sorts of trade life, 
produce, lies for an indefinite period, undergoing foetid decompo- 
sition. Excrement of man and beast, garbage of all sorts, and 
ponded slop water, lying bare upon the common surface. With 
this state of things, be it on a large or a small scale, the chief 
sorts of danger to life arise. One is, that volatile effluvia from the 
refuse, pollute the surrounding air, and everything which it 
contains; the other is—the liquid parts of the refuse pass, by 
soaking or filtering, into the surrounding soil, and there to mingle 
with whatever water the soil may produce, and in certain cases 
thus to occasion the deadliest pollution of any wells or springs 
which may be situate in their neighbourhood. It is a recognized fact, 
that accumulations of this sort do not only affect the places where 
they are collected, but can transmit their infective power through 
certain channels to a great distance. Houses, for instance, which 
have unguarded drainage-communication with sewers or cesspools, 
may receive the same deleterious air through such channels, just 
the same as if the excrement stood rotting within their walls. 
Private or public water reservoirs, or water conduits, giving 
accidental admission to filth, will carry the infection of the filth 
wheresoever their outflow reaches. It has repeatedly come 
within my own knowledge that an individual house, with every 
apparent cleanliness, has received the contagion of fever from 
some drain inlet, or from deposits of filth at a distance. One 
of the most salubrious villages in West Cumberland produced 
ample proof of this only a few weeks ago, where scarlatina broke 
out in a somewhat virulent form. In looking for the cause, it 
was discovered that, some distance from the houses where the 
