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Very few sick persons, however, availed themselves of this official permission to leave the Colony, but a considerable number were still smuggled away, the object being to get out of the Colony without furnishing the addresses at which they had been residing, and it is this suppression by the Chinese of the addresses of infected premises that has necessitated, in each epidemic, a general house to house cleansing and disinfection. A certain number of dead bodies were removed from the Colony under similar restrictions, but, with regard to these also, smuggling was not uncommon, dead plague bodies being even conveyed to Canton in ordinary boxes as cases of hardware, etc., so as to avoid their

nterment at the Plague Cemetery.

Considerable assistance was rendered to the Board by Mr. H. M. HILLIER, Commissioner of Customs, and the Chinese Officials on the mainland, by furnishing the addresses of fugitives from the Colony who landed in the neighbourhood, thus enabling the Officers of the Bard to disinfect the premises whenever there appeared to be any reason to suppose that a case of Bubonic Fever had occurred therein.

I attach a list of the addresses of all cases which occurred in the City of Victoria during 1896 and a parallel list of the addresses of cases which occurred this year, and from these lists it will be seen that in no less than 77 houses out of a total of 539 houses known to have been infected, cases occurred during each of these years. The total number of houses in the city of Victoria is roughly 7,000 (exclusive of Barracks and Police Stations) so that the presumption is that many of these 77 houses had retained the infection of the disease since 1896, and not that they were re-infected afresh this year.

I have already somewhat fully discussed the actiology of the disease in my Annual Report for 1897, but for convenience of reference and to render this report more complete, I append herewith a reprint of the remarks made by me at that time: "This (ie., the occurrence of cases in houses pre- viously infected) appears to me to suggest that the infection of the disease adheres most tenaciously to dwellings which have once become infected, and in view of much of the experimental evidence con- cerning the vitality of the Bubonic Fever bacillus under certain conditions, I am strongly inclined to apply, tentatively, Sanarelli's theory concerning the bacillus of Yellow Fever, namely, that the vitality of the bacillus, outside the living bodies of man and animals, depends largely upon the co-existence of vegetable moulds by which it is nourished, to the infective material of this disease also. It is already well known that a moist atinosphere, defective ventilation, a moderate amount of heat, and the absence of sunlight, are the most favourable conditions for the development of the Bubonic Fever bacillus, while they are also the conditions which encourage the free growth of the vegetable moulds, and it is not unreasonable therefore to surmise that this property of symbiosis, which has also been observed by Metchinkoff in connection with the bacillus of cholera, may have not a little to do with the persistence of the bacillus of Bubonic Fever in damp and ill-ventilated dwellings. This theory may perhaps also serve to throw a side-light upon the origin of the recent epidemic of Bubonic Fever in Bombay and other parts of India, for one of the causes to which the outbreak was freely attributed by scientific authorities on the spot was the consumption of inferior qualities of mouldy grain, which if imported from a district in which the disease is endemic, such as parts of China or North-west India, might well have conveyed the specific bacillus. The following extract from the Indian press bears out this point. "In a public lecture in the Sassoon Institute, Bombay, Dr. G. WATERS disposed of the theory that Bubonic Fever had been imported into Bombay from Hongkong by rats in ships. He inclined to the belief that it was not introduced from other ports, but had its origin in the large granaries of the Mandvie quarter of the town. The first outbreak was among the granary employés, and rat murrain was first discovered there. Surgeon-Colonel CLEGHORN, who has made a special investigation for the Indian authorities holds the same opinion, It is stated as a curions fact by both doctors that wheat and rice eaters have enjoyed almost complete immunity from the disease, which has been most pre- valent among the millet eaters (Hindoos)-millet being a generic term for various kinds of inferior grain. The grain would probably in such a case be primarily infected by rats suffering from the disease, but such infection would only be retained by the inferior and mouldy grain, the bacilli deposited with the excreta in sound, dry grain being unable to retain their vitality during exportation from the infected to uninfected areas. It is an important fact, in this connection, that many of the historical outbreaks of Bubonic Fever have been associated with a failure of the cereal crops and occa- sionally also with outbreaks of ergotism. It is true that the Asiatic races do not eat their rice and other grain uncooked, but most of the inferior grain is ground into flour, which is made into cakes, and the heat necessary to cook these cakes, which are just browned on the outside, is not sufficient to destroy any bacilli there may be in the flour. I do not wish to suggest, however, that diet is the only, or even necessarily the most important factor in the dissemination of this disease, for I am still of the opinion that the atmosphere in the immediate neighbourhood of a patient suffering from the disease, where such patient is confined in a dirty, dark and ill-ventilated dwelling, is infective to very much the same extent as in Typhus Fever, and that when such atmosphere is breathed for any

length of time by a healthy individual, the bacilli have every opportunity of gaining access to the lymphatic system of the respiratory tract by inhalation, and of the alimentary tract by swallowing the mucus and saliva of the mouth and pharynx, to which any particulate bodies in the atmosphere would naturally adhere. I certainly cannot subscribe, however, for the reasons given in my Annual Report for 1895, to the

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