vaccination is performed on children in the most perfect manner with the purest lymph, there is a necessity for a revaccination about the age of puberty; hence the rush we saw for a re-assurance against infection during the epidemic of 1863.

We have no longer, it is true, the absurd charges against vaccination so strongly urged at the commencement of the present century. Boys are no longer instanced who, in consequence of the influence of the "beastly vaccine matter introduced into their blood, have been "heard to bellow;' we hear no more of patches of hair resembling cow's hair ; horns have ceased to grow from children's foreheads; but the cry is not altogether dead, and we hear from time to time of eruptions over the head and body following the lancet's puncture.

These are mild charges, faults which the great discovery can afford to have placed to its debit, even when untruly made; but in France a far graver offence has been of late imputed to vaccination, and one which has attracted the attention of all the scientific professors of medicine. It was asserted that vaccination was chargeable with inoculating a loathsome disease into the blood. The evidence given was pretty conclusive, and for a time Jenner's discovery seemed to be placed once more upon its trial. The discussion which ensued did not reach the public ear, but it was fierce enough to shake the faith for a moment of good men and true. At last, however, to the intense relief of Medicine, it was ascertained that although the disease had undoubtedly been transmitted with the vaccine lymph, yet it had not been transmitted in it, an unskilful vaccinator having removed some of the blood as well as the lymph of an infected child, the consequence was that the next child vaccinated received a double infection. This was no charge against vaccination, but only against the manner in which the act had been performed. As there is but one blood disease that can possibly be thus inoculated, and that but under the rarest possible combination of circumstances which may never recur again, all fear under this head may be said to have gone by.

Thus the last chance has passed away of justifying the extraordinary epitaph erected in the church of Rood Lane, City, by the sister of Mr. Birch, one of the surgeons of St. Thomas's Hospital, which commemorates that "the practice

of cowpoxing, which first became general in his day, undaunted by the overwhelming influence of power and prejudice, and the voice of nations, he uniformly and until death (1815) perseveringly opposed." Mankind are fond. enough of proclaiming themselves true prophets after the event, but perhaps this is the first instance on record in which a man's friends have been so proud of his having been a false prophet as to proclaim the fact in enduring

stone.

But, it will be asked, how was it, vaccination having been so thoroughly proved an absolute protection against smallpox, that we meet persons in crowded places with the eruption still full upon them, and that more people died in the months of March and April, 1863, from a disease we had fondly imagined banished, than in any two previous years? Nay, so severe did it become, especially among children, that there occurred a regular panic in town respecting it, and there were, at one time, fears among the West-end tradesmen that it would cause the "session" to come to an untimely end.

Let us admit it at once. This result is only one example of the price we pay for our determined opposition to centralization. We put the liberty of the individual above every other consideration, and we see that public danger is the result.

In comparison with most of the great European nations, England, the very source of vaccination, is by far the worst protected against smallpox of them all. Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, and Austria stand particularly high in this respect, for the simple reason that children are vaccinated in those countries with the same certainty that they are registered at birth in this.

Some thirty years ago, chiefly at the instance of the medical profession, a compulsory Act was passed, directing that all children should be vaccinated within four months from birth. The sages, however, who passed this law forgot to enact machinery by which it could be worked. There were penalties, it is true, for non-compliance with the Act, but no reasonable means of putting them in force. When the Act first passed, the public for a time were frightened into a steady compliance with its requirements; but they soon found out that the law if it barked could not bite, and by degrees parents, especially among the poorer classes,

began to neglect an act which, for the preservation of their children's lives, was just as essential as their clothing and food.

Moreover, the duty of vaccination was by some unaccountable blunder placed under the direction of the Poorlaw Board, which contracted with medical men for the vaccination of their respective districts. In some cases there occurred such competition for contracts, that there were two vaccinators for one child: consequently poor parents imagined that they were conferring a favour upon the vaccinator in allowing the child to be protected against death; and they attempted to make a bargain with the doctor, saying, "You shall vaccinate baby if you will give so and so a bottle of physic," or if you will "give us a pot of beer." The most rooted antipathy to allow children to be vaccinated—we were again told by the Inspector of Vaccination —was removed by twopence, or the presentation of a toy. Could anything be more absurd than this? If there are faults upon the part of parents, there are also faults in the kind of vaccination which is offered or rather thrust upon them. Upon the efficient manner in which the act of vaccination is performed depends the success of the operation. It is a delicate, if not a difficult, act to perform; but will it be believed that a duty which was necessary to shield the population from a terrible disease was not taught in one of our public hospitals until within the last eight years?

The student passed from these great places of study as ignorant of vaccination as the savage in the woods. When he got into practice he managed to pick up his information as best he could. Consequently, the method of transferring the vaccine lymph from arm to arm, or from the vaccine point to the arm, differed as widely as the ideas of men can differ who have to act without any previous knowledge on a given subject. Some merely scratched the skin; others made a deep puncture; in some cases only two incisions were made, whereas the perfect vaccinator will always make three incisions on each arm. In many cases, through ignorance, the lymph was taken from the arm when it was overripe, and the consequence was not only a source of failure in its power of protection, but a risk that it might cause many of those unsightly eruptions which are known to follow the act of vaccination from impure lymph.

At present, however, adequate instruction in vaccination

is given to the students at St. Thomas's Hospital, and, we believe, most if not all the other schools of medicine; and a certificate of qualification is required by the boards from the candidates for the post of public vaccinator.

We have said enough, and more than enough, to show that in the present state of the law we can never be certain either that the population is well vaccinated, or that the lower stratum of it is vaccinated at all. When an epidemic arises, people rush to the vaccination stations, to protect their little ones against the arrows of pestilence which they see flying around them and striking here and there to the death; but the epidemic passes, and their fears with it—a new crop of unvaccinated children springs up, and a new epidemic, to be repeated every four or five years, sweeps off these neglected children, and spreads terror and contagion among adults.

The Government have yet to realize the fact that we must create a standing army of well-trained medical men, well officered, and ready to meet this enemy day by day, and beat him in detail, and not to allow him to overwhelm us by sudden onslaughts. To give this protective force due efficacy, it should have a medical organization, and not be frittered away among poor-law boards, vaccine boards, or the many conflicting authorities which now create such friction, and make the working of the Vaccination Act a perfect nullity. We have an Officer of Health; why should not the working of the machinery of vaccination be entrusted wholly to him? And if, having given him the proper instruments and subordinates for the due carrying out of Jenner's discovery, he fails (which he would scarcely do), we should dismiss him, and appoint another, as our Yankee friends did in their civil war with those commanders-in-chief who failed against the public enemy in the field.

TOWN TELEGRAPHS

WHILST this metropolis and all other parts of the civilized world have long been put in speedy connection by means of the Electric Telegraph, the three millions of people living within the Post Office radius remained for a long time deprived of the use of this necessary of life. This fact is the more strange inasmuch as the dealings of the great public are much more with their immediate neighbours than with those who live at a distance. Yet while any one could be put in instant communication with the mountaineers of Switzerland or the Tyrol, he had not the means of talking across the town with his own wife or servants at Hampstead. Like some pious missionaries, in looking too much abroad we had overlooked the needs of home. However, the pedestrian who makes his way along the streets, on looking up, discovers that the town is being gradually wired in overhead like the cage of the polar bear at the Zoological Gardens, must have discovered that this deficiency is in rapid progress of being supplied. In fact, the telegraph has been running a race to take possession of the air over our heads, which almost equals the speed with which the engineers are burrowing underground with their rails. Look where we will aloft, we cannot avoid seeing either thick cables suspended by gossamer threads, or parallel lines of wire in immense numbers sweeping from post to post, fixed on the house-tops and suspended over long distances. Two companies contested the aërial right of way, the District Telegraph Company and the Universal Private Telegraph Company. The wires of the former may be known by their being hung in parallel rows like those we see running beside the railway lines, and the latter by the thick cable slung from the two wires above.