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PERMIT me to commence this paper with a confession of faith. In a recent report which I had occasion to make to the Local Government Board upon an outbreak of enteric fever, I thus formulated my creed. " Enteric fever contagium, as we now meet with it, has an ancestry; and, however long and widely and through whatever media it may have travelled about prior to finding a lodgment suitable for its development in a human system, it or its ancestor at one time issued with excremental matter from some individual affected with the disease. I accept this doctrine provisionally, as most in accord with my own experience, and also, so far as I have been able to judge, with that of the most competent and, let me add, most patient observers. With such as dissent from it, I can agree in admitting that there is very much in the natural history of contagium in general, and of enteric fever contagium in particular, wrapt in an obscurity yet unpenetrated; but I am hopeful enough to look forward to the time when the advance of scientific inquiry will render that clear which is now dark. But, however this may be, the doctrine is one which furnishes a salutary rule of practice, inasmuch as it is calculated to foster a minuteness of investigation which has, at any rate, the chance of being fruitful." In this expression of belief, it is encouraging to me to be in accord with my distinguished colleague Dr. George Buchanan, who four years ago wrote as follows. "In an out-of-the way house, looking as if isolated from all chance of infection, where there has been no previous sickness for months or years, but where a number of common nasty conditions exist, a case of fever occurs, and the impulse of the doctor who investigates it is to say that the disease has had a de novo origin from the ordinary excrement-filth of the place. Now, whether or not this has been so is a question of the highest moment to science, but is by no means to be settled out of hand by the apparent absence of specific cause in a few instances. Repeated observations and very complete record of all'the&circumstances are wanted, before any deduction can be properly drawn from such an occurrence as I am supposing. Often room has been left in the records of such cases for doubt as to the nature of the disease in question; or an oversight on a point so demonstrably important as the period of incubation has led observers to hasty and untenable conclusions; or the possibility of dangerous material passing a long distance through the soil or along a stream may not have been held in view; or some vehicle for the conveyance of specific contagion may have been overlooked." Referring then to a piece of inductive work which it was my privilege to be able to do in I870, he goes on to say: " If we consider how, a dozen years ago, those many wonderful outbreaks of enteric fever that we now trace to the agency of milk were unintelligible, and how all of them, instead of being merely regarded as unexplained, were liable to be regarded as demonstrating de novo origin of the disease, we shall the better apprehend the caution with which it is necessary still to proceed before we can affirm the adequacy of any common filth-condition to originate enteric fever Obviously, we have to be incessantly on the look out, not only for these, but for other and even obscurer vehicles for the specific poison; and there are most serious difficulties in arriving at a definite conclusion that no antecedent case has been concerned in the production of a given fever occurrence." (Dr. Buchanan's Inaugural Presidential Address to the Society of AMedical Officers of Health, 1875.) And here, since the Association has under consideration the spread of enteric fever specially through the agency of drinking-water, let us not be forgetful to do honour to the memory of the dead. I allude to my old friend Dr. John Snow, whose indomitable industry and patience of research, undaunted by ridicule, established, a quarter of a century ago, for us and for the world, in respect of cholera, the doctrine of the transmission of bowel-contagium through this medium. Had it not been for his laborious inquiry, it is not likely that our knowledge of the etiology of enteric fever would have been what it is now. He opened the gate and showed us the road. Not only so; he showed us how to tread it in safety. The object I have in writing this paper is to recall to the memory of the Association some of the results of work done in this direction, demonstrating the difficultics which surround endeavours to trace the

Observations on Some of the Ways in which Drinking-Water May Become Polluted with the Contagium of Enteric Fever