REVIEWS. 
293 
content ourselves with a few remarks on the author’s opinions relative to 
that important question whether drains, as we have in London, or middens, 
which some of the manufacturing towns possess, are, all circumstances 
considered, the most convenient and healthy. Thus we shall leave the 
various analyses he publishes out of the question, and shall pass his draw- 
ings of the products found by the microscope in the air of certain localities 
altogether aside. The latter we do more especially because the author has 
given us little or no idea of the enlargement of the specimens, and we fancy 
that in most cases low powers of 400 to GOO diameters have been most 
usually employed. We shall merely notice, too, the fact that he has been 
at pains, in conducting his analyses, to employ the most recent analytic 
methods — excluding Dr. Frankland’s, and including Wanklyn & Chap- 
man’s method. Neither shall we deal with the author’s views on the 
subject of meteorites, which we deem on a par with Sir William Thomp- 
son’s notion, which was given to the British Association. But it seems to 
us that Dr. Smith’s observations on the subject of crowding are most 
valuable, and we hope they will be read and carefully remembered by all 
those who have to do with the building of our towns and the general 
management of house property. Dr. Smith says, “ There is a want of 
willingness to pull down dangerous property, but a readiness to rush for- 
ward to save the life of the greatest crimirnals. Reason is out of the 
question in the matter j we are misled by an uneducated feeling. We like 
to save property, forgetful that deadly weapons and poisons are subject 
to peculiar laws, and their indiscriminate use is forbidden to the nation. 
Houses that produce death are not property ; as well might a man claim 
his debts as such. If a man sells unwholesome meat, the law interferes ; 
if he sells the use of a room with fever in it, the nation seems not to com- 
plain. . . . The time must come — and the sooner the better — when it shall 
be enacted that no land shall contain more people per acre than we know, 
by expei ience in several places, can live healthily thereon. The same 
thing must be said regarding houses . . . because of the degradation of 
some of the population.” On the midden versus sewer system, the author’s 
opinions clearly lead us to this, that where water is abundantly flushed 
through the sewer, it is the best ; otherwise the midden is infinitely supe- 
rior, and causes much less death to the population. Dr. Smith says, he has 
“ come long ago to the conclusion, that the water-closet is one of the 
greatest of luxuries invented in modern times ; but also thinks that the 
midden is better than the bad sewer . . . The question is not a simple one 
for a yes or no, but an extremely complicated one, where many conditions 
must be balanced. This experiment, however, is desirable — the examina- 
tion of the air outside of the houses of a sewered town and a midden town. 
I feel almost confident of the answer ; indeed, the analyses in this volume 
may be said to give it, because the backs and fronts of the houses of 
a midden town give different airs — the backs giving worst ; whereas the 
backs and fronts in a water-system town cannot be different, one would 
suppose. ... I think it probable that, as matters are now conducted, the 
water system will be the worst in all houses not large enough to have 
sufficient separation. . . . We come to this, that the danger is outside in 
the midden system, and inside in the water system, where the danger does 
exist.” 
