148 THE BACTERIA IN ASIATIC CHOLERA. [CH. 



notorious examples. Persons have carried infection into 

 these localities from surrounding parts, were taken ill with 

 cholera in Versailles or Lyons, and although many such 

 cases were carried thither yet cholera gained no footing in 

 either town. During the last epidemic in the south of 

 France in 1884-1885 numbers of persons coming from 

 Marseilles and Toulon must have carried infection into 

 Lyons, yet this city remained free of an epidemic. The 

 position of Lyons cannot account for this, for it is not, like 

 Rome or Madrid, situated on high ground, where one 

 might suppose the cholera contagium would not easily 

 lodge, but would be gradually carried downward into a lower 

 situation by the natural drainage from a high level into low 

 ground. Lyons, on the contrary, is, as regards its moisture 

 and its situation in the Rhone valley, as badly off as any 

 notorious cholera locality ; its cleanliness, its water-supply, 

 its crowded poorer quarters are not a bit better than those 

 of other big cities not enjoying such immunity. This is 

 only one example. In India there are many such localities 

 known ; Dr. Cuningham, the late Sanitary Commissioner 

 with the Government of India, in his most instructive 

 book On Cholera (Calcutta, 1885), has mentioned several 

 of them. 



Von Pettenkofer has minutely dealt with these facts in 

 his various well-known pamphlets and writings on the 

 dependence of cholera on locality, and it is not necessary 

 to enter further into this question. Now this immunity of 

 a given locality, for instance Lyons, seems to me 

 irreconcilable with the facts known about comma-bacilli. 

 A few cases of cholera imported into this locality would 

 yield innumerable masses of comma-bacilli ; the nature and 

 position of such localities is, as compared with other 

 cholera-localities, very favourable for the spread of cholera ; 



