(3) that lymph drawn from these vesicles, and introduced by inoculation into the arms of children, produced in them vaccine vesicles of the true Jennerian type; (4) that free exposure of some of these children to small-pox infection showed them to have acquired a complete protection; and (5) that this new stock of vaccine' had been extensively diffused through the country, and had been fully approved by the best judges of true vaccinia, both in London and the provinces.

Mr. Simon, writing in 1857, stated, that from the new stock thus obtained by Mr. Badcock (not once only, but repeatedly) more than 14,000 persons had been vaccinated by Mr. Badcock himself; and that he had furnished supplies of his lymph to more than 4,000 medical practitioners. And I learn from Mr. Badcock, junior, who is now a public vaccinator at Brighton, that this stock is still in use in that town and neighbourhood.

Against these positive results are to be set the negative results of attempts made in the same direction by many other able experimenters, such as Professor Chauveau and his coadjutors, the recent Belgian Commission, and Professor Burdon Sanderson, as well as the unsatisfactory results obtained by Ceely. But I cannot see that their non-successes are in any way contradictory of the absolute and complete successes which, if testimony is to be trusted, were obtained by Thiele and Badcock. The lesson taught by the failures appears to me to be the careful imitation of the conditions under which the successes were obtained; and as Mr. Badcock, senior, is still living, and is said to be both able and willing to give all needful information, it is the intention of Professor Burdon Sanderson and myself to take an early opportunity of personally obtaining this from him, with a view to a careful and thorough testing of his experiments, with every precaution that experience can devise.

The recent meeting of the Medical Congress has given me the opportunity of personal communication on this subject both with M. Pasteur and M. Chauveau. From the former I learned that his use of the term 'vaccination 'in connection with his employment of the mitigated virus of 'charbon' and 'chicken-cholera,' as a protective against the malignant forms of those diseases, was intended rather as a compliment to Jenner, than as expressive of any belief in the identity of vaccinia and variola. This question, he said, was one which he had not himself investigated, and on which he did not feel himself justified in forming an opinion. But when I asked him whether he considered it to have been already decided in the negative, and further informed him of the positive evidence afforded by Mr. Badcock's experiments, he expressed himself strongly in favour of regarding the question as still open, to be decided by further researches carried on under the new light afforded by the results of his own recent investigations. I found M. Chauveau himself not less

willing to admit the force of the strong analogy between the protective agency of the Jennerian and what I may term the Pastorian ' vaccination,' and not less ready to accept the results of any thorough re-investigation of the subject. Such a re-investigation I hope shortly to see carried out at the Brown Institution by the accomplished young successor to Professor Greenfield, under the superintendence and with the co-operation of Professor Burdon Sanderson, in whose great knowledge, long experience, and wise judgment, all who know him and his pathological work have the fullest confidence.

Now putting altogether on one side the purely scientific interest of this investigation, let us see in what position we shall be, if it should issue in the confirmation of Jenner's view of the fundamental identity of vaccinia and variola; proving Cow-pox to be not a disease sui generis, but Small-pox modified by passing through the Cow.

In the first place, we shall have the scientific basis for the practice of Vaccination, which it has never yet possessed. For it will be then clear that the protective power of vaccination is exactly the same in kind—as it has long been known to be about the same in degree-as that of a first attack of small-pox.

Secondly, the common-sense' argument in favour of Vaccination will be greatly strengthened by the proof that we are not poisoning the blood of our children with a new disease (which some of the most vehement of the anti-vaccinationists maintain to be already destroying the vitality of the nation), but are merely imparting to them in its mildest form a disease which everyone is liable, without such protection, to take at any time. Those who would hasten to protect their flocks and herds by Pastorian vaccination' against a deadly 'charbon' raging in their neighbourhood-as who would not?-cannot, in common consistency, refuse Jennerian vaccination for their children.

And thirdly, we shall be furnished with the means of obtaining, at any time, an original stock of vaccinia, the continuous transmission of which through a succession of heifers will at the same time secure the maintenance of its potency, and exclude the chance of human contamination.

Among the numerous other researches now being followed out on the Pastorian lines, I may notice two as likely to prove of the highest practical importance:-those which, in the hands of Drs. Klebs and Tommasi Crudeli, seem likely to demonstrate that marsh-malaria derive their potency from organic germs (an idea that singularly harmonises with the periodicity which is the special character of the varied forms of disease they induce); and those which, based on the original discovery of Villemin (in 1865) as to the communicability of tubercle by inoculation, are rendering it probable that this terrible VOL. X.-No. 56. 00

scourge (including not only pulmonary consumption, but scrofulous disease in all its varied forms) really depends on the presence of a microphyte, which may be introduced into the body, not merely by direct passage into the blood-current (as in inoculation), but also through the alimentary canal, or even through the lungs. This doctrine, which was first advanced by Professor Klebs four years ago, has lately been the subject of most careful research by Dr. Schüller of Greifswald: who has shown that every form of tuberculosis can thus be artificially induced, the characteristic micrococcus spreading rapidly in the blood and tissues of the animal inoculated with it; and that if, in an animal so infected, any joint is experimentally injured, that joint at once becomes a place of preferential resort to the micrococcus, and the special or exclusive seat of characteristic tubercular changes a fact of the utmost practical interest in its relation to human joint-diseases. Another line of inquiry which has obviously the most important bearing upon human welfare, is the propagability of the micrococcus of tubercle by the milk of cows affected with tuberculosis; a question in regard to which some very striking facts were brought before the Medical Congress by a promising young pathologist, Dr. Creighton.

Well might Mr. Simon conclude his admirable address as President of the Public Health Section of the Congress with these pregnant words: I venture to say that in the records of human industry it would be impossible to point to work of more promise to the world than these various contributions to the knowledge of disease, and of its cure and prevention; and they are contributions which, from the nature of the case, have come, and could only have come, from the performance of experiments on living animals."

W. B. CARPENTER.

OUR HIGHWAYS.

Ir was said of a certain county, by its historian Aubrey, that 'by reason of its clear ayre and clean wayes, it was full of many gentile habitations.' There can be no question that while there is no greater proof of a backward civilisation than an absence of good roads in a country, there are few more certain means of advancing its prosperity than by improving its internal communication. In England, as elsewhere, the Romans were our great masters in the art of roadmaking. A thousand years of disuse have not sufficed to obliterate from the face of the country, traces of the long lines of roadway which connected their principal camps and stations with each other. Some of them still serve as the foundation of modern highways. But, for the most part being designed and executed for military purposes alone, they remain simply as monuments to attest the energy and the engineering skill of a race who were at one time the indisputable masters of what was then the civilised world. Our Saxon forefathers were far behind them in this respect. Despite the example which had been set them, their ideas of local self-government gravitated in a very different direction. The withdrawal of the controlling and originating central authority told in England, as it did elsewhere, against the continuance of the intercourse which had previously existed between localities distant from each other. Great as were the capacities for managing their own affairs, displayed by the various districts into which England became split up after the departure of the Romans, there is no blinking the fact that the roads, even in the more frequented parts of the country, became steadily worse. The old Roman streets' were no longer kept in repair, partly, no doubt, because the exigencies of trade refused to be warped into the lines of strategical convenience; but partly also, it must be admitted, because public opinion was by no means alive to the necessity of good roads at all. The commerce of the country, such as it was, was carried on mainly by means of packhorses. Chariots had ceased to be used for the purposes of war; such wains as there were, had their cumbrous fabric supported upon wheels hewn out of a solid block of wood, which creaked and groaned as they rumbled along over the hardest and most gravelly tracks which could be found for them. Wherever

firm soil was wanting, each waggoner picked out for himself a new line of country, warned against bogs and marshes by the apparent failures of those who had immediately preceded them. Where the land had begun to be enclosed, and the soil was tenacious, 'lanes' of enormous width were left to serve as the main arteries of traffic, each vehicle during winter carefully avoiding old tracks, as leading to certain breakdowns. The results of this primitive order of things may still be traced distinctly all over that large portion of the south of England which remains unenclosed, and even in those parts of the midland counties where the population has not increased rapidly, and traces are still left of the general configuration of the country. Macaulay has left us a striking description of the state of the sister country in this respect so late as the time of William the Third. We know how it fared with Scotland before the days of General Wade, so celebrated for his road-making exploits. Nor have we reason to believe that any real advance was made in road-making science in England itself, until the use of wheeled carriages became general, and the construction of something like sound ground upon which they could travel became in consequence a necessity.

As usual in England, relief when it did come was not initiated by the State, but was left to be accomplished by the efforts of private enterprise. The gradual sanction and formation of turnpike trusts commenced in the last century, and probably reached its highest point of efficiency just before the old mail-coach roads' of the United Kingdom were finally superseded by railways, and the magnificent teams' which traversed them by day and night had to give way to the untiring iron horse. Of course the natural consequence of the neglect of its duty by the central authority resulted in a want of system, and occasionally also in a want of engineering skill. Scotland and Ireland, which were both nearly a generation behind England in the matter of road making, eventually eclipsed her altogether. All their more important highways were constructed more or less under the supervision of a central authority, and at a time when engineering science was far more advanced both in the art of avoiding obstacles when they could be avoided, and of encountering them when they had to be faced. There grew up, too, a class of men of whom the late Lord George Cavendish and Mr. Battie Wrightson were perhaps the most familiar examples to those of the present generation, who devoted their attention in Parliament to the solution of the intricate questions to which these trusts incessantly gave rise, and to the reduction into something like order, of the chaos which had been gradually created by their number and importance to the public. In justice to those who managed them it must be said that, under their auspices, the main roads of the United Kingdom became models of construction, which, albeit they had been provided at the expense, and were managed under the superin