been insisted upon more with a view to prevent solids 
entering the sewers than to prevent the escape of effluvia. 
A great number of the traps in ordinary use are of no use 
whatever for either purpose. If the plan of outside com- 
munication with drains were adopted there would be no 
necessity for any trap in any house. An efficient trap often 
itself becomes a great nuisance through the putrefaction 
which takes place in its fluid contents : without fluid no 
trap exists. 
It is impossible to more than touch on the evils of our 
existing system of Towns’ drainage. I know of my own 
knowledge that there are very few houses into which sewer 
gas does not permeate. From actual observation I know 
that our general sewage system is most defective. That is, 
if you agree with me that no sewer is rightly constructed 
which allows its contents to stagnate or solid matters to 
accumulate. Our house drains are many of them in a state 
which beggars description, and through them, and through 
our abominable middens, the soil on which we live is super- 
saturated with foecal matter. 
If health authorities are wise they will at once take steps 
to set their houses in order, and the only way to banish 
Typhoid fever from the land is by radically reforming the 
defects which I have pointed out. 
The Prince’s illness has compelled attention to these 
defects, and I am only sorry to see men of eminence in the 
scientific world urging such paltry palliative remedies as 
charcoal pans, instead of insisting on what will prove 
cheapest in the end — real radical reform of commonly 
admitted evils. 
Mr. Henky H. Howoeth remarked that he spoke with- 
out any special knowledge of the subject, and as a mere 
Philistine, but he thought that some elementary facts of 
common experience were overlooked by the gentlemen who 
were engaged in improving our drainage system. He was 
