that of Australia is heavy, and rapidly increasing. The exhibits of these countries in the Centennial have opened the eyes of the Americans to the character of their trade, and the desirability of turning as much of the stream as possible in this direction. The benefits which China and Japan might receive from such an enterprise would much depend upon the use they were disposed to make of it, and the peoples of both are capricious. But it would bring Australia more closely within the circle of nations, and, besides aiding her commerce, would relieve her from that isolation on the globe to which her geographical position seemed fifty years ago to condemn her.

The successful Atlantic Cable of 1866 was constructed by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, with which the firm of Glass, Elliot, and Co., and the GuttaPercha Company were fused in the year 1864. The operations of this energetic company have been most extensive and continuous. The total number of nautical miles of submarine telegraph cables laid in all parts of the world by this company, or in course of construction, is 45,051, and the following are the longest, with the date of submersion:Nautical Miles.

SMALLPOX IN LONDON.

AN epidemic of smallpox in London in the year 1863— people packing and running into the country-letters in the Times giving "certain" cures for this loathsome disease; other letters detailing the best means of preventing "pitting" -persons blotched with scarcely dried pustules meeting you in every street! Shade of Jenner, was the merciful shield which thy genius had held over us for more than half a century pierced and broken at last? People seemed helpless in the reappearance of a once-conquered plague, and resigned to bewail afresh its ravages upon youthful beauty. There was scarcely warranty for all these fears, but there was quite enough warning given to show us that, although the shield was as impervious as ever, we were neglecting from time to time to use it. The Registrar-General's returns during eight or nine months proved that smallpox was gradually gaining upon us, and that for months the deaths from this disease averaged something higher than sixty a week.

The cause of all this was the difficulty of getting the public to take even the smallest trouble for the sake of warding off a merely prospective evil; or perhaps we may rather ascribe it to that immobility of the human mind which is such a bar to progress of every kind.

Without going into a detailed history of the proceedings of Jenner, we may say that the tardy discovery of vaccination itself affords one of the best examples of the length of time the seed of an idea calculated to save an enormous amount of human suffering to all posterity, will sometimes lie in the mind before it bears fruit. Let us take inoculation as an instance.

At a time when smallpox was as destructive as the plague itself, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, happening to be at Adrianople, was struck with the fact that the Turks were in the habit of making terms with the disease, by receiving it into their system by way of the skin, instead of by the lungs, as in the natural mode of infection. Possibly the lively nature

of the lady's letters had more to do with the sensation this new practice created in England than the magnitude of the truth she made known, and to this day we believe that the public have some idea that it was a discovery made by her ladyship, and which she had the boldness to put in practice upon her own son. Yet no fact is more certain than that throughout Asia the practice of inoculation had obtained for ages; and that the Chinese-the inevitable nation to which we have always to go back for the birth of any great discovery-systematically employed inoculation as early as the sixth century. Yet, strange to say, in Asia this precious knowledge came to a dead standstill; and had it not been for the lively English lady, inoculation might not have been introduced into England for another half-century, and possibly vaccination would even now be in the womb of Time.

That inoculation was a grand step towards the practice of vaccination there can be little doubt, although Science did not at the time appreciate the fact. It taught us that the disease received into the circulation by the skin was infinitely less dangerous than the disease "caught" by inhalation through the lungs, a circumstance which medicine cannot explain to this day. The deaths from smallpox during some of the severe epidemics of the last century were not less than a third of those attacked, but the improved practice of inoculation reduced these deaths to one in two hundred !

This in itself, no doubt, was a grand result, but unfortunately it told only for those who were inoculated; for inasmuch as it was the practice of physicians to send their patients into the open air, and as inoculated smallpox was as contagious as the disease pure and simple, those persons in their turn became centres of contagion. it had been possible to have insulated every inoculated person until he had passed the stage of infection, it is just possible that vaccination might not yet have been discovered, inasmuch as half-measures often keep off for a long time

If

sweeping reforms; but as this was not possible, inoculation only made matters worse.

This fact was clearly proved by the London Bills of Mortality, which showed that during the first thirty years of the eighteenth century (before inoculation), out of 1000 deaths, those from smallpox were seventy-four, whilst during an equal number of years at the end of the century, after inoculation, they amounted to ninety-five—thus proving that the practice had increased the deaths in a proportion of five to four. This result, however, came from putting the practice in force in a crowded city; no doubt the result would have been widely different in country places and among thinly populated districts, otherwise it would not have been handed down for centuries over vast continents.

But the extreme difficulty with which the idea of vaccination germinated was still more remarkable than the slow progress made by inoculation. It must not be supposed that Jenner was the first to discover that the inoculation of the matter from pustules in the cow's teat afforded a protection to the milkers against smallpox. So far from this being the case, the fact was noticed in a Gottingen paper as early as 1769; and at Keil, in Germany, and also at Holstein, the protective influence of the cowpox eruption was recognized nearly as early. Strange to say, in Asia also, in the province of Lus, the milkers have a disease long known as Photo-Shooter, contracted from milking the camel in the same way as cowpox is contracted from milking the cow, and it is found to be equally protective against the smallpox. It was Jenner's glory that, having become acquainted with the fact from the Gloucestershire dairymaids, by a pure process of induction he proved the value of the protective agent, by first inoculating the boy Phipps with the cowpox, and, after the lapse of some little time, testing its protective power by inoculating smallpox, the failure of which to produce the dread disease affording the final proof of the value of vaccination. From the lymph taken from this boy's arm, he drew and put in circulation the new life-protecting agent. All the early vaccinations were made from him, and indeed there can be no doubt that a large quantity of the vaccine matter at present in existence, took its rise from the ferment promoted in the boy's blood by the original operation performed in 1796. In justice, a bas-relief of this bold youth should have been placed on the basement of the

statue to Jenner, as a reward for allowing so doubtful an experiment to have been tried upon his own person for the good of mankind.

Although he suspected the fact, it was not certainly known to Jenner that smallpox and cowpox were the same thing; or rather, that the latter is only a modified form of the former, its venom having been destroyed by passing through the body of the cow.

In the year 1801, Dr. Gassner, of Gunzburg, after many trials, managed to inoculate smallpox into a cow, and from the lymph thereby produced he vaccinated four children successfully; and forty years afterwards Dr. Thiele, of Kasan, not only repeated this experiment, but carried it a step further by placing the vaccinated children in the same bed with smallpox patients, and even had them vaccinated with smallpox matter, with perfect impunity. Since that time, Mr. Badcock, of Brighton, has put this discovery to a highly practical use, inasmuch as by inoculating cows with smallpox he has from time to time been enabled to put large quantities of vaccine lymph into circulation,—a very important matter, as there can be little doubt that the old stock has become deteriorated, and has ceased to be so protective in its influence as heretofore.

Dr. Jenner, we know, put upon record "his full and perfect confidence that it (the protective influence of vaccine lymph) might be continued in perpetuity by inoculating from one human being to another in the same way as smallpox," and this opinion the Vaccine Board has endorsed. Theoretically this is perhaps true; nevertheless, there is good reason to doubt the fact practically, as operators sometimes take their lymph from imperfectly formed or over-ripe vesicles, a known cause of enfeeblement of its action. It is well known, at all events, that fresh lymph from the cow "takes better," gives signs of producing more constitutional disturbance, and forms a truer Jennerian vesicle (the great proof of successful vaccination), than is produced by lymph which has passed through a long descent from the cow. this is a statement which especially refers to the comparatively deficient quality of the general current lymph of the country, it is highly important, and, as Mr. Simon very justly says, it points "to the necessity for a periodical renewal of lymph."

As

It is pretty generally allowed, however, that even when