94 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
filters was approximately 50 per 100,000. At the present time 
it is about 13 per 100,000. In Cincinnati the typhoid death 
rate before the installation of filters was about 50 per 100,000, 
and at the present time it is approximately 8 per 100,000. 
Many other instances could be cited, but the limitations of this 
paper will not permit. 
With present knowledge regarding the influence of public 
“water supplies on the public health, and the methods whereby 
water supplies may be purified, the maintenance of an impure 
public water supply can be due only to ignorance and negli- 
gence. Unfortunately there are a number of communities, 
principally of small size, which exhibit either this ignorance 
or negligence. There are 20 such cities in the state of Illinois, 
When it is considered that an impure public water supply not 
only affects the citizens of the community in which the supply 
exists, but also affects visitors to that town, and causes the 
town to become a focus of infection throughout a wide area, 
it is perfectly plain that the state at large has an interest in 
the matter, and that state boards of health should have ample 
power to demand that no public water supply be installed unless 
it is obtained from a source of assured good quality, and that 
any existing public water supply that does not measure up to 
modern sanitary standards, should be purified or replaced by 
a supply of naturally good quality. This power exists in most 
states east of Illinois, and in many west of Illinois, but has 
not been specifically granted in Illinois. The public of the coun- 
try is now fully educated to the desirability of such regulation 
and there is no reason why it should longer be withheld. 
Sewerage systems seem to have quite as great an antiquity 
as waterworks, as evidenced by the world-famous Cloaca 
Maxima of Rome and the supposed tile pipe sewers recently 
discovered on the Island of Crete, which were used by a pre- 
Grecian civilization, These earlier sewers very nearly approx- 
imate in their character and purpose the modern sewerage 
system. But like water works, the sewerage system as we un- 
derstand it in modern times, is a relatively recent development 
very closely paralleling the development of public water sup- 
plies. In fact both from the sanitary and utilitarian point 
of view a sewerage system should be regarded as a concomitant 
part of a waterworks system, and vice versa, a waterworks 
