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PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 
T have now set out the general character of my second question 
—What Australia has done on broad lines in public hygiene and 
sanitation. The indications of a preparedness to advance are 
evident in numerous directions: The natural basis is ready, and 
everything seems hopeful for the more scientific forward move- 
ment, for which modern bacteriology has so nobly paved the way. 
SECTION III. 
Legislators of some experience must have found in every general 
Public Health Bill brought before Parliament, that defining the 
powers and responsibilities of the State or Central authority on 
the one hand, and those of the local authority on the other, 
constituted the crucial point in the Bill, and more particularly in 
so far as the relative powers of each bore upon the control and 
administration of infectious or communicable diseases. Clearly a 
large amount of sanitary work exists in a community indepen- 
dently of this, the apportionment of which raises little or no 
difficulty. Whether the central authority or the local authority 
shall be entrusted with the administration of the public aspect 
of these diseases is the problem on which turns the immediate 
future of Public Health legislation. It is fortunate for its 
solution that it is upon this very class of diseases that the achieve- 
ments of science have shed the greatest light, and upon which 
bacteriology is prepared to give the most practical advice. 
Communicable or infectious diseases are recognised as pre- 
ventible, and it is because they are preventible the responsibility 
is laid upon those who are entrusted by the law to conserve the 
public health to give special attention to their management. 
These diseases are preventible in the sense that they cannot come 
into existence without the agency of certain germs, which 
bacteriology affirms are capable of control and extinction. In 
other words imperfect health may exist, and diseases of a serious 
nature may affect the human body, but such conditions of health 
will not bring about any communicable or infectious disease 
unless microbic life be present. To handle intelligently, for the 
public safety, this prolitic source of disease, means the application 
of the principles of modern hygiene on a large and effective 
scale. It is therefore of the utmost moment to decide in whose 
hands this function should rest. To assist in the solution of the 
problem, the following a prior? considerations are submitted :— 
1. The natural history of microbic life suggests the recognition 
of two points, their origin or natural history, that is, their 
mode of existence outside the human body, and their pathogenetic 
history, that is, their existence in the body as the immediate 
cause of disease. It is well known that certain insanitary con- 
ditions favour the growth of microbic life, and even lend special 
