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interesting investigations proved that the distribution of
cholera in the South of London particularly was, in a very
unmistakable manner, coincident with the distribution by
the water companies of highly impure water, and that a very
remarkable outbreak of cholera in the neighbourhood of
Golden Square was almost entirely dependent on the use
of the impure-water of a highly esteemed pump—the Broad
Street Pump. Again, it is a very remarkable fact, to which
the Registrar General has called special attention, that the
outbreak in the East of London, which alone gave to the
prevalence of Cholera in London last year the dignity of
an epidemic, coincided as nearly as possible with the
area supplied by the East London Water Company, and
as nearly as can now be ascertained with a time at which
that Company improperly distributed water derived from
an impure and sewage-infected source. Further, investigations
(aided by experiments on some of the lower
animals) which were made originally in Germany, and
were during the late epidemic repeated and extended in
this metropolis, seem to shew almost conclusively that the
poison which causes the spread of cholera is contained in
the evacuations discharged from the bowels of cholera
patients, and that this (little if at all active at the moment
when the evacuations are discharged) soon assumes so marvellous
a degree of virulence that mere traces of it, mixed
with large volumes of water, are capable of rendering that
water choler-ific in a very high degree; these investigations
seem also to confirm, what had already been suspected by
many Physicians, that the infection of cholera is not, like
that of typhus and many of the typioal forms of infectious