all, there has been a very remarkable diminution in some, coming almost to a vanishing point.

With regard to the action taken to remedy the defects in the construction and arrangement of dwellings, the Act of 1842 was designed to prevent the erection of further dwellings of the more vicious type, but the Act of 1864 was the first one dealing in any efficient manner with the courts which had been already constructed. It was then also that some regard was paid to the air spaces about new dwellings, and in after years, regulations and bye-laws more fully dealing with requirements of this description have been acted upon. Meantime a large amount of the old original badly constructed property-what we now know as "insanitary property "-has been dealt with in various ways. Much of it has been swept away for city improvements, or by railway companies, warehouse owners, etc., the site in these cases being used for business purposes. A great deal of it has been dealt with by the Corporation, the insanitary area being cleared and suitable. cottages or blocks of buildings appropriate to the wants of the working classes erected thereon. From 1864 to 1880 the practice also largely obtained of removing a house here and there, in order to improve the neighbouring ones, but this plan gave no opportunity for rehousing those displaced and after all, was barely palliative of the evil.

Since 1880 the Corporation have dealt with large numbers of these houses by demolition, no less than 4149 having been so dealt with during the last fifteen years, and new streets of cottages, provided with every sanitary requisite, erected in their place.

Turning once more to the water supply, in 1875 every court in the city had its own special stand-pipe, and as everybody knows, in 1893 the then existing supply was supplemented by water from Lake Vyrnwy. We may say

then, that at the present time water for the poorer classes and for sanitary purposes is free and abundant, and there is no reason why for these purposes it should not be as free and abundant as air. No one can complain of it on the score of quality or of cheapness, since it is collected. from the hills of Wales, remote from sources of pollution, stored in the lake, conveyed 68 miles, protected from every possible source of contamination, and delivered within our houses at a cost of something less than 1d. a ton.

With regard to provision for the isolation of the infectious sick, as I have already said, this up to 1884 was left to the Poor-Law Authorities to deal with. Prior to 1884, the City Council made no provision for illness of this kind; such cases were either treated in their own homes, or removed to the Workhouses, some few being treated at the Netherfield Road Hospital. Infectious diseases were then endemic, and periodically assumed formidable proportions, sheds were sometimes extemporised by the Poor-Law Authorities to meet emergencies, but they were almost useless for preventive purposes.

In 1884 a site was secured at Parkhill, and suitable pavilions added from time to time, until the present provision of 300 beds was reached. In 1886 the Netherfield Road Hospital was taken over by the Corporation and subsequently adapted to modern requirements. In 1888 the Grafton Street Hospital was erected and opened for use.

Infectious hospitals, so far as the patients are concerned, occupy exactly the same position as the general hospitals do in regard to illnesses of a non-infectious character; but so far as the community is concerned they have a vastly more important function, viz., that of checking the spread of infection. The public, generally speaking, are quite alive to both of these advantages, and the consequence is, that the actual number of cases of

infectious sickness occuring in the city tends to diminish, but each year a very much larger proportion of that number is removed for treatment in the city hospital.

We may say, with truth, that the reason why the actual total diminishes, is because a larger proportion do go to the hospitals, and the foci of infection are consequently diminished. Thus, the diseases, the largest proportion of which is removed to the hospital, are numerically the least formidable. In the case of typhus, for example, in the years 1893-4 92% were removed to the hospital. In the case of smallpox every patient is removed to hospital. In the case of scarlet fever the proportion removed is increasing, the actual number of patients in the city diminishing; thus, about 36% were removed to hospital during 1893, and it must be stated that those patients who are removed to hospital recover in a larger proportion than those who are left in their own homes. With regard to smallpox, the great preventive is, of course, vaccination, and no doubt the day will come when this important duty will cease to be an obligation upon those bodies whose chief function is to provide for the destitute, and will be, as it ought to be, an obligation imposed upon the Sanitary Authority, the body responsible for the public health.

The gross result of the expenditure of money and time and pains may be indicated by the following consideration:

Taking a period of, say, the last thirty years, during which the progress of sanitation was considerable, if during each of those three decennial periods the death rate had remained at 32, the figure which it stood at during the first of them, considerably upwards of 70,000 more deaths would have occurred during this period. In other words, a section of the community of this city now alive and well, numerically much greater than the whole

of Warrington, or almost double that of Southport, would have been dead. That figure also means, roughly, a little over 1 in 10 of the present population, so that but for this change in sanitary administration, one-tenth of any set or section that you think of would have disappeared.

Upon this may be based a calculation of the saving of health, and of added years of useful life with the prosperity and contentment following upon it. That there is still room and need for further advance goes without saying, but it is not now the time to indicate the direction in which that improvement may be looked for.

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THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL HORIZON, AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY, DOWN TO THE END OF THE AGE OF DISCOVERY.

BY GEORGE PHILIP, JUNR., F.R.G.S.

ANY attempt to trace the gradual growth of man's knowledge of the earth, its extent, configuration, and the relations it bears to the heavenly bodies, must begin with the first glimmering of the geographical instinct in primeval times. For prehistoric man must have possessed a local geographical knowledge, just as in our own day the savage is intimately acquainted with the neighbourhood of his home, whose hill-sides and forests, rivers and lakes supply him with food and protect him from his enemies. This "local geography" is the German Heimatskunde, which has been defined by Dr. Rüge as the "sum-total of the individual's imaginative perceptions of the surrounding phenomena of Nature." Heimatskunde is the seed out of which has grown the science of geography.

Prehistoric man stood centred in a narrow circle, whose circumference was the limits of his individual experience, and it was only when men began to unite together in settled communities, sharing the same language and customs, that the separate geographical experiences of individuals were gradually fused into the larger geography of the state; and the Fatherland, in the place of the individual, became the centre of the universe.

The belief that one's own country is the centre of the