324 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



as possible, to appraise the respective shares which air and 

 water take in the great act of distribution. That both 

 cholera and typhoid fever are sometimes disseminated by 

 drinking-water has been amply proved. I have myself re- 

 lated many instances of the fact, and have in my notes the 

 record of many others still more striking. But that water 

 is the sole or even the chief vehicle of cholera and typhoid 

 is a notion which, if I may trust my own experience, facts 

 do not warrant. 



" Limiting myself, for the moment, to the case of typhoid, 

 I am in a position to state that all the worst and most wide- 

 spread outbreaks of that fever which I have ever witnessed, 

 have occurred among communities supplied by drinking- 

 water which was absolutely blameless. Two illustrations 

 will suffice. 



" I live in a town in which the divorce between sewage 

 and drinking-water has long been consummated. Bristol 

 is supplied with drinking-water which from its source in the 

 Mendips to the tap from which it is delivered under high 

 pressure to the consumer, flows through conduits out of all 

 reach of sewage contamination. 



" And yet typhoid fever has not only not ceased to exist 

 in Bristol, but about eight or ten years ago (before the 

 appointment of a health-officer), there occurred in the Parish 

 of St. James one of the worst outbreaks of this fever which 

 I have ever seen in the city. In the course of a circuit 

 which I took one morning with the late Dr. Pring (at that 

 time Poor Law Medical Officer) I saw within a compara- 

 tively small area more than eighty cases of the disease. 



" Now, with the exception of a single household, all the 

 patients were drinking the Mendip water; the very same 

 water which, as far as fever is concerned, more than 150,000 

 of their fellow-citizens outside the infected area were drink- 

 ing with absolute impunity. 



" Some four or five years ago I was sent for to advise 



