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slaughtering of sheep by a butcher who had no licence. Of the six
heard at the police court, two were issued in connection with the
seizure of a quantity of diseased meat in the Cattle Market Area,
part of it being the carcase of a diseased cow which had dropped
dead in the street, and had then been conveyed to one of the
Corporation Slaughter Houses, and there dressed as if fit for human
food. Being obliged, however, to depend chiefly upon unwilling and
adverse witnesses, the case fell through, and the summonses were
dismissed with costs, although, (and perhaps it will be thought singular
enough) one of the parties—acowkeeper of Hackney—was convicted
upon the same evidence, and fined £5 at a neighbouring police court
for knowingly sending the identical cow through the streets while
suffering from pleuro-pneunomia, contrary to the provisions of
the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act, 1869, under which the
Metropolitan Board of Works prosecuted as the local authority.
Another summons was taken out under the 38th Section of "The
Sanitary Act, 1866," against a man and wife for removing articles
of clothing, bedding, &c., which had been exposed to infection in a
house in which their own two children and several other persons
had had Scarlet Fever, without any previous disinfection. This
summons was also dismissed, but without costs, the private medical
attendant in the case, whom we were compelled to call, and by
whom the removal had been advised, giving evidence contrary to
our expectation in direct exculpation of the defendants. A summons
under the same section against another party, but connected with
this case, was then withdrawn; and a further summons against the
defendants, previously referred to, for failing to comply with a notice
to disinfect under the 22nd Section of the Sanitary Act, 1866, was
subsequently heard and dismissed by the same magistrate, and in
doing so he impugned the certificate which I had given, and upon
which the notice had been served, as being worthless, because I had
not myself seen the infected persons. Had this latter case not have
been so intimately associated with the other summonses under the
38th Section, so as to render the circumstances attending it quite
exceptional, it would have been of the utmost importance that an
appeal should have been made against the decision of the magistrate,
as I regard this section as perhaps the most valuable one in the
whole of "The Nuisances Removal or Sanitary Acts," and as
certainly containing the principle upon which all our sanitary