The cause of low sanitary condition is quite a distinct question, and is the first subject for inquiry when a high death-rate proves its existence. This is most distinctly the province of the medical officer of health. As with an individual, so with a community, when evidence of ill-health is observed, professional advice is sought, in the first place to diagnose the form of disease, and then to prescribe a remedy, or, at least, a palliative. The public, with the aid of statistics, have become convinced that the health of communities, as tested by their death rates, differ to an extent that cannot be explained by the variation in the proportions of the sexes, or the different age-distribution in the population. The force of public opinion has called into existence an army of health officers to advise on health matters, and it cannot be too well understood between the public and health officers, that the public knows its health is unsatisfactory, and is in earnest when it asks how it may be improved. No impossibilities are looked for from health officers, but if they cannot reduce the death-rates under present circumstances, it is, at least, expected that they will point to the causes which limit their usefulness, and if further co-operation of the part of the parson, the schoolmaster, and the policeman be necessary, let them boldly ask for it. If they do not get the support they ask for, their responsibility will cease. Above all, let us hear less of high death-rates being unavoidable where density of population and a large proportion of the working-classes prevail. It is just these very conditions that render the advice of a health officer most necessary, and where it can be followed with the best results. There is a tendency to talk of the poor as of a class who must die at a higher rate than those who are well off, and to consider their existence in a community in large proportions as a sufficient reason and explanation of a high death-rate. The unsanitary condition of the poor and of their dwellings is doubtless often the cause of high death-rates, and is thus one of the principal reasons for the necessity for the appointment of health officers, but it is indeed a hopeless view to take of the future of sanitary progress, if we allow ourselves to regard this unsanitary condition as in

evitable.

No reasonable person will expect from the unaided efforts of any health officer that the death-rate in St. Giles' can in a year or two be reduced to that of St. James', but it is no less true that the excess of death-rate in the former is due to low sanitary condition; and it should be clearly understood that it is quite possible to have density of population combined with good sanitary condition and low death-rates, and further that there is no physical reason why the working classes should suffer from higher death-rates than do the professional and upper classes, who live a more artificial, and in many respects, a less healthy sphere of existence.

of complaint against the Registrar-General's figures is that they do not show a satisfactory result for the sanitary work of recent years. This is, in fact, evidence of reliability of these death-rates as a test of sanitary condition in its broad sense. Real sanitary progress has been made in many places, and deathrates there show it incontestably. The rate for the whole of England, however, shows little reduction, because what has been gained by sanitary work in some places has been lost in others from the want of it. During the past twenty years we have been gradually turning our rivers into open sewers, and contaminating all the old sources of water-supply; and this with increasing aggregation in towns, and the growth of numberless colliery villages, without the shadow of sanitary forethought or provision, would, without the balancing effect of improved sanitary condition in other ways and places, have told most unfavourably upon our death-rates. Our present sanitary organisation, full of imperfections as it is, is already bringing all sections of the nation under some sort of sanitary control; and it may confidently be hoped that in the last six years of the decade, 1871-80, a great advance will have been made in the sanitary condition of the people. Of one thing, however, we may rest assured, that no such real improvement can take place without its becoming apparent in the death-rate, for it is impossible to reduce the fatality of zymotic diseases, or the proportion of infant mortality, or the death-rate among elderly persons, without reducing the general death-rate calculated by the simple population standard. Death-rates are inevitably a sound test of sanitary condition in its broad simple sense, but they cannot be used to prove the competence or incompetence of a health officer, and for this purpose we are not aware that they have ever been used by the Registrar-General.

THE STANDARD OF MILK ADULTERATION.

THE recent case in the police-court at Greenwich, in which a milkman who was charged with adulterating his milk with ten per cent. of water, and acquitted notwithstanding the concurrent testimony of four public analysts to the fact of the adulteration, dence, has afforded a subject of comment for the and in the absence of any relevant rebutting evidaily newspapers. One of our contemporaries has particularly distinguished itself by its curious misrepresentations, and, after representing the case as forms its readers that the analysts had recently met one in which analysts gave conflicting evidence, into discuss whether milk contained 9 or 9.3 per cent..

of water, and then-gushing with eloquence-declares that though all the analysts in the kingdom should resolve that it (the water) ought to stop at nine per cent., still it would go up to ten or eleven

The event commemorated by our contemporary in this manner happened at the general meeting of the Society of Public Analysts, at which the committee proposed for general adoption a standard of 9 per cent. of 'solids not fat,' and were met, not with proposals for a lower standard of 'solids not fat,' but with the proposal to enact the figure 9.3.

In order to understand the difference between the two proposals, it should be borne in mind that if a given sample of milk which had been analysed were calculated by the standard 9.3, it would be represented as having been watered to the extent of 4 per cent. more than if calculated by the standard 9. The reason, moreover, why the standard 9 was proposed by the committee (instead of the true standard, 9.3) was a desire to be cautious and to provide against experimental error. Indeed, as was explained at the meeting, the proposal to prosecute if the solids not fat' fell in the smallest degree below 9 per cent., and the proposal to state the standard at 9'3, and to abstain from prosecution unless a small margin of experimental error were overpassed, would come in practice to the same thing.

A Greenwich correspondent of the Standard writes to that paper to say that a very important piece of evidence for the defence did not come out at the trial; viz., that in April a sample of milk taken from one of the defendant's cows, in presence of an independent witness, was analysed by Mr. Heisch, the public analyst, and found by him to contain too much cream and too much salt, and 10 per cent. of added water. In giving publicity to this statement, we should fail in our duty if we did not, at the same time, publish that Messrs. Heisch and Wigner have written to the magistrate who presided over the case, offering to make analyses of twenty samples of milk milked in their presence from twenty of the milkman's cows, and to abide by the results.

PRIZE DESIGNS FOR DWELLINGS.

THE daily journals of the past few weeks have contained two modest but nevertheless significant paragraphs with respect to the dwellings of our working-classes, which, taken together, may almost be considered as a satire upon our times. One day, the directors of the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company, aided in their judgment by the highest professional talent, awarded two prizes for designs of houses best adapted for the working community, and commended four others. But whilst appropriating the premiums, they were constrained to confess that each and all of the plans were too costly to suit them, although otherwise commodiously planned and economically designed. Almost the next day we read that a prize had been offered for the best essay upon the application of sanitary science to rural districts and dwellings. The competitors for

this new guerdon are recommended to recognise the powers possessed, but not exercised, by the Local Government Board, the diversity of opinions amongst its advisers, and, taking everything into consideration, are to suggest what new powers it would be advisable to grant that honourable Board. The fact is, that if we are truly careful to meet all the requirements of the Metropolitan Building Acts, and provide for all the claims of the Lodging-Houses and other Acts, we shall not be able to design a house for our London artisans that will prove self-remunerative under a rent which they cannot afford to pay; and if we desire to erect a new hamlet in the country, we are lost as to our exact rights of sewage conveyance and water-supply.

The intelligent foreigner would smile at this, as in duty bound. But we are the pioneers of sanitary progress, and must root up many curious anomalies whilst planting our new vineyards. We are demolishing the squalid houses where our artisans once resided and we wish to build them new ones which theoretical Hygeists shall find little fault with, and which shall not much trouble the practical sanitary inspectors. We have also the remaining half-good and half-bad dwellings to torture into healthy circumspection. And surely we have striven hard to achieve at least passable honours in this simple branch of architecture. We are not first medallists in the architecture of public buildings perhaps, but we have been blessed with scores of decorated essayists upon domestic construction. The Associated Architectural Societies, the Associations for Improving the Dwellings and Domestic Condition of our Labourers, the Royal and other Agricultural Societies of England, the Highland Society of Scotland, the Royal Dublin and other Societies, have all issued more or less voluminous prize reports and published model designs for houses and cottages. Royalty itself has condescended to plan residences. for our workmen, and even erected them in our midst in 1851; and when Paris was in the throes of its house reconstruction, the commendable occupation was followed by an Imperial potentate. More than this, the artisans themselves have competed with each other, and the Workmen's Exhibition of 1870, held at Islington, yielded up to criticism some plans of homely house architecture.

With all this we are unhappy. For one thing, we know full well that the bulk of those who build the houses of our working poor care little for learned reports and prize-designs, and oftener than otherwise they are run up by those of their own class who have been successful in life, and who are a law unto themselves even in the matter of architecture-busy bees who have made honey and who have just sense enough to escape the legal cobwebs which hang about the scaffolding of our Dwelling House and Public Health Acts. And we may also rely upon it full well, that it will not be until many more agitations have been got over somehow, and many more

halting and incomplete Acts passed through the Legislature, that houses will be built which the workmen will rush to inhabit, nor occupy merely through impecuniosity, or for the sake of contiguity to the industrial hives of their working hours. The time may come, and that right early, when something good and practical will follow the example set by the marquisate-town of Shaftesbury, and when such as these, completed, will prove luminous guides for future dealings with artisan requirements, but it will take considerable time to polarise all the experiences which they will set before us. And if the model dwellings of our poorer classes are to fill our suburban sites, and not nestle, Somers-Town like, in our cities, it may be that it will be found necessary to compel our railway companies to grant still further advantages to our workmen in the shape of morning and afternoon locomotion. And speaking of railway companies, many a lesson in the erection of cheap and good labourer's cottages might be obtained from their drawers and pigeon-holes. Their engineers know how very many plans were carried out and practically tested before the best levelcrossing cottage was hit upon, and the design put away and labelled as a stock-drawing of railway servant's cottage on the line, probably for ever.

Notes of the Wech.

PUBLIC HEALTH EXAMINATIONS. WE believe that the Society of Apothecaries are about to institute an examination for medical men who purpose becoming candidates for Public Health appointments.

Candidates possessing this diploma will have a far higher credential of fitness than any private testimonials could be, and in taking this step the society is not only following its traditions of concern for the public interest, but is the first of the medical corporations to take action in recognising the importance of this branch of science.

SALT AND SNOW.

MR. CHURCH, in a communication to the Times, and Mr. Mackie, in another to the Standard, advocate the employment of salt whenever, through snow or frost, the roads become dangerous or difficult. The suggestion has evoked considerable opposition in many quarters, and especially from Dr. Alfred Carpenter, of Croydon, who points out that the application of salt to snow will have the effect of producing a very cold mixture, which is likely to penetrate the boots of pedestrians, and produce serious results. To this objection it may be answered that such would be the effect of the admixture of snow and salt, were they enclosed in a close vessel, such as a refrigerator; but spread out on the road and pavements the conducting power of the earth will prevent the mixture from falling above one degree lower than that of the surrounding atmosphere. It is a certain fact that if the roads be kept moderately salted, which can be easily done by the admixture of rough salt with water in the ordinary watering carts, and its subsequent distribution over the roads, travelling through the slippery streets will be greatly facilitated, and much of the suffering and damage to horses which has been observable during the last fortnight will be greatly lessened, if not entirely obviated.

NEW FACTORY ACT. YESTERDAY (January 1) the act passed in the late session came into operation to improve the health of women, young persons, and children employed in the manufactories, and the education of such children. The period of employment is to be from six to six or from seven to seven o'clock; the employment not to be continuously longer than four hours and a half without half an hour for a meal, except on Saturdays, when the employment is not to be beyond half-past one o'clock. Two hours each day, save on Saturday, to be allowed for meals, and one hour before three o'clock. There are provisions in the new act as to education and school attendance. Employment during meal time is strictly prohibited.

METROPOLITAN WATER-SUPPLY.

THE monthly report of Dr. Frankland, on the London Water-Supply for December, does not show satisfactory results. The Grand Junction and Lambeth companies supply contained 'living and moving organisms,' whilst that of the Chelsea Company, in addition to abundance of such organisms, was served up with fragments of woollen and cotton fabrics, clots of the mycelium of a fungus, and fibres of partially digested or decomposed flesh meat.' The above is a somewhat unsavoury description of the London water. In the face of such a report, however, it behoves the various water companies to take some more active and efficient measures for purifying their supply, which Dr. Frankland very properly describes as being unfit for dietetic purposes, and it could not be so used without serious risk

to health.'

ARSENIC IN WALL-PAPERS.

Ir might have been thought that enough had been ascertained and written of the amount of arsenic to be found in the ordinary bright green wall-papers to deter people from having them used as mural decorations in their houses.

It appears, however, that this is not the case, for we have been supplied by Mr. Carter, of Liverpool, with the details of a case of the kind which has lately come under his notice, and singularly enough in the house of a medical man, whom it would naturally have been supposed would have been alive to the danger lurking in the bright green colour of the paper in question. It appears that a few weeks since Mr. Carter was asked to see in consultation a brother medical man, who was dangerously ill of erysipelas of the face and scalp. He had only just removed into a new house. On entering his consulting-room Mr. Carter was struck with the bright green of the wall-paper, and asked to have a piece supplied to him. After some time this was done, when he found, on examining it, that it was, as he anticipated, arsenical. Mr. Carter does not, however, suggest that the newly hung wall-paper had anything to do with the attack; but he does offer the simple and valuable suggestion that, as the methods for discovering arsenic are so simple and so accurate, medical men should always take care to guard themselves, at least (and without much trouble they may guard their patients also) against the risk of injury from this source.

THE REGISTRAR-GENERAL'S WEEKLY
RETURN.

WE are informed that with the new year the RegistrarGeneral's weekly return for London will be enlarged, so as to furnish information relative to the whole of the city and metropolitan police districts. This area, at the last census, contained a population of 631, 381 persons in addition to the 3,254,260, who lived within the boundaries of Registration London. The population of the metropolitan and police districts at the middle of 1875, is estimated at about four and a quarter millions of persons. The suburban area of the metropolitan police district, for which the registrar-general will now, for the