194 Sewage and Sewerage. | April, 
like these, when praise is not always rightly bestowed, when 
Dr. Croly writes two octavo volumes of apology for George IV., 
when Lord Wrottesley would fain reverse Sir Walter Scott's 
judgment on Dr. Paris’s philisterhaft ‘ Biography of Sir Humphry 
Davy,’ and speaks of it in his address to the Royal Society as “a 
most felicitous instance of a perfect biography,” and M. About gives to 
the world, with his own name appended, a glorification of Prince 
Jerome Napoleon, we cannot recommend any one to take any 
panegyric on trust, and we recommend our readers to obtain this 
same Report* and read it for themselves. It is with a feeling of 
shame that we recollect that in an English House of Commons 
objections were raised to the payment of some small salary to one 
of the authors of this Report, much as, we doubt not, in many a 
garrison town objections were raised to the carrying out of its 
recommendations, which have saved and will save to the country 
hundreds of lives and thousands on thousands of pounds. 
Of Dr. Parkes’s work on ‘ Practical Hygiene’ we can speak in 
the very terms which he applies to the Barrack Commissioners’ — 
Report, and say that “it is difficult to speak too highly of its excel- 
lence.” It treats of many subjects besides those treated of by the 
Commissioners or glanced at in this review; but in all alike, its 
information, style, and spirit are of the very first order of merit. 
Biological and hygienic science is advancing rapidly, but it will be 
long before Dr. Parkes’s book is superseded. 
Dr. Acland’s ‘ Memoir on the Cholera in Oxford’ may serve as 
a model for the drawing-up the histories of similar visitations. It 
is marked by the grace and insight of its accomplished author; and 
giving a picture of the disease at once in its social, its medical, and 
its statistical aspects, it will furnish every reader with the informa- 
tion which his taste, knowledge, or ignorance may lead him to 
seek for. 
The ‘ Seventh Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council ’ 
is a production of great value; but, like Dr. Parkes’s book in this 
particular also, it travels over several topics—that of vaccination, 
for instance, with which we have no concern here. By a short but 
excellent Report of Dr. Hunter’s, ‘On the Alleged Injury from the 
Sewage Works at Northampton,’ in which we find the vera causa 
of the mischief to be, as at Croydon, defective house arrangements, 
and here, notably, our old enemy, the cesspools, we pass from 
the hygienics of the entire community to those of the poor exclu- 
* This, we should add, from our own experience, is no easy task; the wise 
regulations of a certain Chancellor of the Exchequer (not the present one) having, 
we are told, curtailed greatly the number cf Blue Books issued and distributed, 
and expedited greatly their passage into the hands of the waste-paper seller. The 
taxation, however, of this great country has been relieved by this measure to the 
extent of several pounds sterling per annum in postage. 
