1022 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 
bill of South Australia was nothing short of £50,000 ; but there 
were deaths from other preventible diseases than typhoid fever, 
amounting in all to 649, and, looked at from this point of view, 
the loss inflicted during that year upon South Australia, could not 
be less than £200,000. 
These figures, although presented with great brevity, must 
emphasise to our representatives the fact that public hygiene is 
not merely a financial question in virtue of public expenditure, but 
more because of the national loss its absence entails. If the 
standard of public health is a high one, the nation’s gains are great, 
if the reverse, its losses are enormous. Lord Playfair was amply 
justified in saying, at the meeting in the Guildhall to which I 
have already referred, “ That no community could make a more 
advantageous investment, than to spend annually in proportion to 
its population, a few thousands, or hundreds of thousands in 
securing the best standard of public health.” 
But I may be permitted to offer our legislators another considera- 
tion. It is frankly admitted that not many years ago, great diversity 
of opinion existed among those who were credited with knowing 
the origin and nature of preventible diseases, with the usual 
result that the public were left in uncertainty and the victims of 
superstition. It may be remembered as an historical fact by some 
here, that not later than 1832 a Bill was introduced into the British 
House of Commons with the preamble ‘‘ Whereas it has pleased 
Almighty God to visit the United Kingdom with the disease called 
Cholera, &e,” and although science disclaim any such theory as to 
the origin of clisease, for. many years even after 1832, it spoke of 
hidden cosmic and telluric influences as the agents at work in the 
production of those desolating epidemic visitations. 
All this is now changed, hypothesis has given place to fact, and 
uncertainty to knowledge. The secret has been discovered, and 
new light has at last been shed on a hitherto dark and mysterious 
page of nature. To the germ theory of disease belongs the credit 
of this transformation. Butit is no longera theory, it has become 
a science. During the last twenty years bacteriology has laid 
bare the minute and living organisms, to whose activity so many 
of the ills of our race are due, and it has become the repository of 
the facts and generalisations that constitute the basis of the present 
day pr inciples. and practice of Public Hygiene. These living 
organisms, it is true, are subtle and minute, but no mystery 
attaches now to the conditions of their life or their management. 
They are ponderable bodies, subject to physical law, and there is 
no uncertainty as to the course they will, in any circumstances of 
important practical moment, pursue. If they are present in a 
iquid medium they will precipitate or remain afloat according to 
their specific gravities. If they lie upon a moist surface, they will 
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