Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/650

632 the cholera attacks those sites which lie in a valley which crosses the streets, and the places which are situate on the heights between two valleys are spared. In the valleys, however, which are only crossed by one principal road, the epidemic spreads itself in places which lie in the valley upward and downward in the direction of the river, although the intercommunication may be very slight and the river not navigable. In Central India for a long time the great rivers were the principal means of communication, and the cholera spread by preference along these routes. When in recent times the Indian railways were started, it was thought that cholera would forsake the old routes and travel along the railway. But such was found by Cornish not to be the case. Of course, the same statement holds good in Europe. Saxony is perhaps as thickly peopled and as much overrun with railways as any state in Germany. Since 1836 cholera prevailed in Saxony on no less than eleven different years; but, as Reinhard and Günther have proved, its propagation was not in any way directed by the developing network of railways. Certain places in Saxony always were the centers for cholera, and so remained despite the railways. Freiberg, in Saxony, was never visited by cholera either before or after the railway was completed, while certain parts of the Mulde and Pleisse Thal were regularly visited. As often as an epidemic of cholera broke out in North or South Germany, cases were observed in Saxony; but for an epidemic to develop in Saxony always required time. Every year in Saxony which was marked by a heavy death-rate from cholera was preceded by a year during which the mortality was comparatively slight. Thus, in 1849 there were 488 deaths; in 1850, 1,5.51; in 1865, 358; and in 1866, as many as 6,731; again, only four cases in 1872, but 365 in 1873.

If the cholera can be brought by sufferers direct from India to Toulon, where the sea-passage lasts only three weeks, then if the di s-ease prevail in North Germany it must always spread to South and West Germany, and inversely, since we have nothing but cholera on the one hand and healthy people on the other. But whoever studies the history of cholera will find nothing but contradictions of this postulate of the contagionists. In 1854 Berlin took no cholera from Munich, and in 1866 Munich received no cholera from Berlin, notwithstanding extensive intercommunication during the Industrial Exhibition and despite the war.



HE "children of the public," as the street Arabs are called by that agreeable writer, Edward Everett Hale, are known for their acuteness rather than for their docility. The mots of the Paris gamin give to the French feuilleton not a little of its spice, and his Anglo-Saxon 