434
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channels, houses, quays, stores, &c.; the superintendence of the work of the rat catchers; the preparation of cultures of Danysz
bacillus and its distribution.
(13) The special destruction of rats in infected areas.
(14) Preventive inoculation with Haffkine's prophylactic.
(15) The keeping of the necessary registers and notices, also bulletins received from Southern China and the issuing of the weekly
reports.
These duties, it will be seen, are distinct from the ordinary routine of the Sani- tary Department, which is occupied chiefly in matters relating to the scavenging and conservancy of the City of Victoria, the villages and Kowloon; to the abate- ment of nuisances, etc.; to the drainage of houses; and to the dealing with cases of small-pox, cholera, diphtheria and other infectious diseases.
31. Neither do the duties in any way touch the larger sanitary questions of the Colony such as the distribution of the water-supply and its purity as apart from the constructive work, the maintenance of the sewerage and its flushing arrangements, the laying out of streets, public and private, projecting new streets and scavenging lanes, improving the line of old streets, the reservation of open spaces, the construc- tion of healthy houses, the space to be left between and about buildings to secure free circulation of air, the provision of public and private latrines and urinals. Nor do they include the abolition of cubicles without windows nor the larger questions relating to insanitary property. There are areas such as No. 5 district in which nothing short of acquiring the property, compensating the owners, and demolishing and reconstructing, can improve the sanitary conditions, and there are others in which the conditions can gradually be improved. There is also the very important duty of preventing what is actually even now taking place of insanitary areas springing up in the town; and of blocks of buildings being erected to contain hundreds of inmates without the owner of the buildings being obliged to provide for each house a latrine in the backyard, and for every block a public latrine with a proportional number of seats to the number of inmates the block is likely to contain.
32. It is only necessary to enumerate these sanitary duties which are now more or less carried out by different and independent officers, but are not co-ordinated under the head of a department, to make it obvious that a Sanitary Board, meeting infrequently and having a President who is particularly well fitted for the position, but who is not expected to devote his whole time to the duties or even the greater portion of his time, who has no administrative or executive powers other than carry- ing out the decisions of the Board in meeting and who is not on the Executive Council of the Government, cannot give that continuous and detailed attention to the sanitary requirements which the rapidly growing City of Victoria on one side of the harbour and the town of Kowloon on the other, demand.
33. In order, however, that the President and Sanitary Board shall be able to effectively deal with these questions, it is necessary that the Public Health and Building Ordinances shall give them the necessary powers. I have already men- tioned that the internal design of a Chinese house as constructed in this Colony is insanitary. The rooms, as a rule, are far too deep, the object of this depth being to sub-divide each room into a number of cubicles for the accommodation of families or lodgers. Though there may be windows at each end of the room, the great depth materially obstructs the light. For instance, to take an example from the better class of buildings, many of the houses that are being erected on the Praya are eighty feet deep without lateral windows and contain long narrow rooms of fifty-five feet in depth, by twelve or thirteen feet in width, lighted in front by a window and also in the rear by another window which looks into a backyard of twelve feet in depth. The houses are sixty feet high and behind the backyard of twelve feet, approached by a