50 
and Typhoid have each their distinctive periods of duration, 
rash, symptoms, and probably causation. Typhoid Fever is 
essentially a drain fever, and may be caused or excited by 
drinking impure water or inhalation of impure air. Most 
people hold that the specific Typhoid poison cannot be gene- 
rated cle novo. I hold most positively that it can, and not 
only it, but every individual kind of fever poison. Such is 
not the rule, but the exceptions are so numerous and well 
marked as to leave no doubt that certain conditions of 
putrefactive decay or decomposition give, as their resultant, 
certain definite specific fever poisons. As it may be said 
this is a matter for the curious rather than for the practical, 
I will leave it as it stands. All however agree that tainted 
water and tainted air may and do predispose to or excite 
attacks of Typhoid and other fevers, and that thejr are both 
pregnant sources of blood-poisoning. It is also agreed that 
“ even a fractional contamination of the air of a sleeping 
room with sewer gas is almost certain to produce disease 
sooner or later.” 
Yet notwithstanding the universal testimony of medical 
men of common sense and observation that sewer gas is so 
fatal in its results, we have, as a sequence on our advance in 
domestic civilisation, so constructed our houses, our sewers, 
and our drains that our living rooms and the rooms in 
which our food is cooked, dressed, or stored, are 'par excel- 
lence the receptacles of tainted air. It is to this frightful 
state of things that I would call your special attention. 
We have in our towns main and minor sewers. These 
are too often not sewers but cesspools, and if cesspools, of 
course generators of sewer gases. As a rule these sewers 
have been laid piecemeal without any reference to a definite 
general system. The existence of a river has had the effect 
of determining the direction of sewers quite independently 
of any sanitary considerations. All relating to the direc- 
tion, Ac., of sewers, ought to be decided without any reference 
