455 



report just issued. It is needless, perhaps, to furnish 

 examples illustrative of this principle, which is familiar with 

 the experience of all observers, and the very recent exemp- 

 tion of Sarepta, a Moravian colony on the Wolga, noted 

 for its cleanliness and well conducted inhabitants, from any 

 visitation by the cholera during the present epidemic, or 

 that which raged along that direct line in 1830, is another 

 instance as applicable to that disease of what we have long 

 known to be operative with respect to typhus. As filth, 

 however, is still elsewhere predominant, it behoves us to 

 deal with it. The media by means of which infecting par- 

 ticles are communicated to the human system are probably 

 various, though not of such a character, I think, as at all to 

 justify the severe restrictions imposed by the quarantine 

 laws now prevalent in the east. The most efficient cordons 

 sanitaires I have always considered would be found in an 

 intelligent regard being had to the conservation, by already 

 well ascertained means, of the health and comfort of those 

 at home. That certain porous solid bodies are capable of 

 receiving and retaining within their interstices noxious fluid 

 and gaseous communicable particles, I, as a contagionist 

 under certain circumstances, am prepared to admit; but 

 I believe that under dilution they would ordinarily be harm- 

 lessly in contact and respired by persons really possessing 

 an average state of good health; and that it is the low 

 standard of salubrity of those living within the area of 

 confined masses of stagnant atmospheric air, charged with 

 septic vapours, which gives a predisposition to the reception 

 of morbid impressions in these cases, rather than to any 

 peculiar chemical or other affinity subsisting between ma- 

 larious particles and the respiratory medium of the individual 

 system. In the common typhus of towns these conditions 

 are very obviously traced to a total disregard of sewerage, 

 as furnishing the infecting agent, and of due ventilation as 



