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ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 
men and women too, should speak out strongly once for all on the 
matter. There is a general impression, and it is probably a right 
impression, that we have gone a little too far in the matter of 
sewer-ventilation—a little too far in a wrong direction. We are 
told, doubtless rightly told, that certain fevers which decimated 
the inhabitants of our towns up to a hundred or even fifty years 
ago, were probably largely due to the emanations from open urban 
ditches and similar collections of impurities. Well, we filled up 
the unsightly conduits, we avoided pestilential accumulations, and 
we substituted closed pipes and drains. But now, under some fancy 
that these tubular channels all need ventilating, we adopt such 
mechanical contrivances as shall, or, at all events, may and often 
do, bring the noisome vapour to the feet of adults or children at 
any moment as they walk past the gratings in the ground, or, much 
worse, bring it to the mouths and nostrils of girls and boys as they 
play near or perhaps actually peer into the grid-guarded caverns. 
True, we do not allow the contents of the passages to stagnate, as 
in old days, but so far as we ventilate them, that is, wash them 
out with air, and bring that possibly pestilential air to the lungs 
of human beings, to that extent we are making a retrograde move¬ 
ment towards the fever-breeding arrangements of pre-sanitary 
history. If our practice in this respect is right, we ought to 
increase the number of these gratings, or, indeed, have open iron¬ 
work along the whole length of these reeking aqueducts. If the 
practice is right, why not dry up, by the ventilating current of 
air, not a part only of the fluid, but the whole. But our practice, 
in my opinion, is not right. These mains do not need ventilation, 
or not as a rule. In our larger cities, wherever the horrid 
galleries are of a character to need workmen within them, venti¬ 
lation is necessary for the sake of the men, lest they “be stifled 
in the vault to whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes 
in.” But such large mains generally run under wide roads whence 
the vapour can, through the gratings in the centre of the road, the 
more readily escape up into the atmosphere. At all events venti¬ 
lation then ofiers the minimum of evil. But why drains into 
which a man never goes, which are in fact too small for a man to 
enter, should all be ventilated, is beyond my comprehension. Of 
course there must be no such pressure within them—caused by 
the rush of flushing-water or what not—as to drive their vapour¬ 
laden air past the water-traps of our homes into the rooms in which 
we live. But some judiciously disposed vent-pipes, such as are 
largely used already, opening above the ground level, but not near 
windows or other inlets of houses, will prevent that result. These 
