254. Tur Microscope. 
taken from the waters of the harbor into which was poured the 
sewage of the city. Several deaths occurred. These mussels 
taken from pure water are perfectly acceptable articles of food, 
but those from the sewage contaminated areas were found to be 
virulently poisonous, killing rabbits in from two to ten minutes. 
These and similar results are due to the microscopic living agents 
of fermentation and putrefaction, either by their direct action 
when taken into the stomach, or through the accumulations of 
poisons produced by them in the decomposing materials. Milk is 
peculiarly liable to fermentative changes and so dangerous as food 
when improperly handled. Let it not, however, be understood 
from this that all fermented products are necessarily unhealthful. 
It is only when certain specific changes take place that danger ex- 
ists. It behooves us to find out what and why. But the most dan- 
gerous of such contaminations are those finding their way into 
drinking water, and among all the deplorable records in the tables 
of sanitary science are those of typhoid fever, certainly a parasitic 
disease, and almost wholly communicated through the agency of 
water. : 
It is stated that there are, in the United States, twenty-five 
thousand deaths annually from this wasteful disease, representing 
one million, five hundred thousand cases. The one million, two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand, who recover, lose at least six weeks from 
the activities of life, besides the care entailed upon attendants, and 
the miseries of the sick chamber. 
If we count the loss in money by reason of incapacity of the 
sick to labor, and the expense of attendance together at one dollar 
per day, we shal] have for those who survive an aggregate annual 
financial loss of $52,500,000,000, all of which ought to be avoided. 
Possibly our present knowledge is not sufficient, even if rationally 
and carefully used, to fully extirpate this appalling malady; but 
we are positive that the great highway to further information is com- 
petent to reach the merciful end. In Philadelphia last year there 
were reported six hundred deaths from typhoid fever—from at 
least three thousand cases—upon which an editor of a medical 
journal remarks: “ It would seem that no more effectual method 
could be devised for the generation and introduction of noxious 
gases than exists even now in thousands of houses in this city.” 
The violent epidemics of this disease in Brooklyn, N. Y., and of 
