of the local medical practitioner. She remarked, "Oh! Ce
n'est rien; papa dit que c'est la sante des enfants"! Parasitic worms
of various kinds, though they often cause disease and death, are
accepted and tolerated even by the most refined and luxurious, who
risk infection rather than submit to the precaution of abstention from
raw vegetables and fruits, or to the expenditure of trouble in
cleansing those nests of infective germs. It is only within the last
thirty or forty years that such cleanliness of body and of clothing
and of house-fittings as will banish parasitic insects has become at
all general. The common house-fly is still tolerated, although it is a
notorious carrier of dirt and disease, and is bred by dirt and dirt
only, its eggs being hatched in old stable manure. The diminution of
late years of house-flies in London houses is simply and solely due to
legislation compelling the removal of horse manure from the "mews" so
frequent at the back of London streets. Egyptian natives still allow
flies to gather on their eyelids without protest.

Of the bacteria and similar microscopic germs of disease--to which all
our infective fevers are due--we have only become aware quite
recently, within the half-century. Before they were known, cleanliness
and the destruction of putrescible matter in man's surroundings had,
it is true, been urged by sanitary reformers. Disinfectants and
antiseptics were deliberately made use of for this purpose in the
mid-Victorian period, when carbolic acid and chlorinated lime were
established in the place of those feebler destroyers of the germs of
putrefaction and disease--namely, the extracts of aromatic herbs or
the essential oils themselves. These, as perfumes and unguents, really
served, not merely to gratify the olfactory sense, but to destroy by
their chemical action the germs of disease. Men tolerated gnats and
their bites (mosquitoes as we prefer to call them in order to delude
ourselves into the belief that they are not British) until it was
discovered that they, and they only, carry the parasitic germs of two
deadly diseases--malaria, or ague, and yellow fever. Now we shall
destroy the pools in which they breed, just as we are destroying the
manure heaps in which the house-fly breeds. When we look over the list
it is really astonishing how much remains to be done, even in England,
in establishing increased cleanliness and freeing ourselves from the
murderous tyranny of parasit