air stirring—suddenly forty men were seized
with cholera in one night. In two days
more, two hundred and fifty-six had been
attacked in all; of whom one hundred and
thirty-one were already dead. We have had
nothing like this in our cholera epidemics.
Some epidemics are confined to particular
latitudes; though most, after having been
engendered in the tropics, pass onward to
the north, without losing anything of their
power. The yellow fever is the most definite
in its range. Incapable of existing under
either extreme of heat or cold—stopped by
the blowing of a cool wind for only a few
hours, and unknown under any other
thermometrical readings than from between seventy-
six and eighty-six degrees—as soon as it ceases
its true form it is transformed to typhus;
typhus commencing precisely at the line
where yellow fever ends. This fact that
certain epidemics are engendered by places and
circumstances, not carried about by persons,
is greatly insisted on, with a view to abolish
all personal quarantine, where the climate
renders the introduction of certain forms of
disease impossible.

Better house arrangements, better food,
improved cultivation of land, including
especially drainage, and the cutting down of
huge forests, wider streets, and better means
of cleansing them—all these are among the
reasons why civilisation is ranked as one of
the great causes of amelioration in the type
of epidemics, whether ordinary or
extraordinary. That eternal myth of the Good
Old Times fades into a very sorry reality
when one looks at it narrowly! In the
substitution of fresh for salt meat, and
in the introduction of vegetables, our dietary
table has infinitely reduced the chances of
disease and mortality as compared with
what they were in the Good Old Times.
Even as late as the eighteenth century, fresh
salads were sent from Holland for the table
of Queen Caroline; and Sir John Pringle,
writing in the middle of the last century,
states that in the time of his grandfather cabbages
were sold for a crown a-piece. It was not
until the close of the sixteenth century
(fifteen hundred and eighty-five) that the
potato was first brought to England, where
it was limited to the garden for at least a
century and a half after it had been planted
by Sir Walter Raleigh in his own garden.
It was first cultivated as a field-crop in Scotland
in the year seventeen hundred and fifty-
two.

We all know what sanitary effects result
from the free use of fresh vegetables and
fresh meat; so that, if we will but improve
other things as much as we have improved
our national diet, we may hope for the
gradual extinction of epidemical disease.
We have it in our own power. We hold
the power, as we hold every faculty and
privilege we possess, in trust from the Creator
of all things and all creatures. If we once
fairly understand and learn the great lesson,
that man can control nature, we shall then
turn our time to better account. Industry,
cleanliness, forethought, knowledge, above all
such chemical and physiological knowledge
as will teach us practical health, these are
enemies to epidemics, and in a fair fight they
must conquer. What a terrible reflection
it is, to think that hundreds and thousands
of our fellow-creatures have died preventible
deaths, and that we are literally suicides and
murderers from blind adhesion to ignorance
and dirt!

MORE SUNDAYS ABROAD.

STILL on tramp toward the south we came
to Dresden, and there rested five days; but as
they were week-days their experiences gave
us no insight into the Sunday usages of the
place, and I only allude to them because it
would seem unbecoming to pass the capital
of Saxony without a word; and because I
feel morally convinced that of all the art-
wonders collected in the Zwinger, Das Grüne
Gewölbe, and in the picture gallery, all of
which we visited, not any of them are visible
to the public on Sunday. On a sultry day in
August we struggled, dusty and athirst, into
Vienna. It is said that the first impressions
of a traveller are the most faithful, and I
therefore transcribe from a diary of that
time some of my recollections of the first
Sunday spent in the capital of Austria. It is
not flattering:

"Yesterday (Sunday), we rambled through
a part of the city known as Lerchenfeld, in
the suburb of St. Joseph, where the low lite
of Vienna is exhibited. It was a kind of
fair. The way was lined with petty booths
and stalls, furnished with fruit, pipes, and
common pastry. Here, were sold live rabbits
and birds; there, paper clock-faces,
engravings, wings, and figures of saints. In
one part, was a succession of places of
public resort, like our tea-gardens in appearance,
but devoted to the sale of other beverages:
tea being here almost unknown,
except as a medicine. From each of them
there streamed the mingled sounds of obstreperous
music and human voices, while in
several there appeared to be a sort of
conjuring exhibition in course of performance.
Further on, there came from the opposite
side of the way the screaming of a flageolet,
heard far above its accompaniment of a violin
and a couple of horns, to all of which the
shuffling and scraping of many feet formed a
sort of dull bass, as the dancers whirled
round in their interminable waltz. Looking
into the window of the building thus
outrageously conspicuous, we saw a motley
crowd of persons of both sexes, and in such a
variety of costumes as scarcely any other city
but Vienna could furnish; some of them
careering round in the excitement of the