746 Water in Relation to Health and Disease. 
slops from many or all the dwellings, and all the drains from the 
streets and roadsides pour their contents into them, until they 
become practically sewers of the worst and filthiest description. 
Moreover, refuse from the premises of the carcass butcher and 
the knackerman, one or both of which are to be found in every 
parish, also adds considerably to the dangers of simple and speci- 
fic organic pollution. From these two sources there is periodi- 
cally discharged blood, excrement, and offal laden with the most 
deadly of both human and animal contagia— anthrax, swine 
plague, and tuberculosis — besides the ordinary organic filth 
incidental to such establishments. It is needless to say that the 
refuse from a single case of anthrax may, if local circumstances 
co-operate, exert a terribly infective power on considerable 
volumes of water, and prove a centre of widespread destruction. 
Little or no attention has hitherto been given to these rural 
plague-spots, from which infection is openly scattered, not only 
by water, but also by manure, and by the distribution of infected 
flesh to kennels, and to wholesale horse-meat establishments in 
our large commercial centres. Examples of the danger of these 
places are repeatedly brought under our notice. So recently as 
March last twelve bags of anthrax flesh were despatched from a 
small Midland town to London. This had been previously 
conveyed over the highways in the neighbourhood from which 
it was sent, and could hardly fail to leave in its track the virus 
of the disease. 
The capability of anthrax organisms to live in our water- 
courses, and still retain their virulence, has been established as a 
scientific certainty by Deatroptoff. 1 This observer succeeded in 
demonstrating the existence of anthrax bacilli in the mud taken 
from the bottom of a well near Odessa. It appears that an 
epizootic of anthrax broke out on land where numerous flocks 
of sheep were pastured ; several of the dead sheep were buried, 
and the others removed to another pen some kilometres distant, 
having a special watering pond. The infected pen was care- 
fully disinfected, and the walls being washed with sublimate, the 
earth was raised to a depth of 25 centimetres, and replaced by 
fresh soil. On their return to the disinfected pen the sheep, 
which had been perfectly well in the second pen, again began to 
be attacked by anthrax. A new change, with a second disinfec- 
tion, was followed by a recurrence of the disease on the return of 
the sheep to the former pen. The proprietor at last noticed that 
the epizootic only recommenced when the water of this well was 
used — water avoided by the farm people on account of its brack- 
1 Medical Times and Gazette. 
