the corruption of springs, wells, reservoirs, and aqueducts, the sale of dangerous drugs, the sale of "swill milk" and watered milk, the sale of unwholesome meat, the condition of tenement and lodging houses, but say that "local and private interests have, it is thought, often been strong enough to paralyze the action of local health authorities"—an opinion that was violently confirmed a few years after, when they found themselves involved in a lawsuit with a powerful firm who were corrupting the water supply of a town with offal. It rendered a report to the Legislature of 1870, when it had been at work only six months, and had little of achievement to relate; but in the lofty ideals it holds up, and its catalogue of reasonable hopes for the future, though only a pamphlet of fifty-eight pages, it remains to this day a good sanitary bible for the earnest disciple. It would be amusing if it were not painful to see how gingerly it walked, claiming only "advisory" powers, it was by no means firm in the saddle and dreaded lest some "watchdog of the treasury" should land it on the ground. In the second year, an investigation was begun of the possibilities of improvement in tenement houses, which it is not too much to say has led up to the immense improvement in that class of dwellings throughout the United States; and in the third year it was directed by an act of the Legislature on April 6, 1873, to "consider the general subject of the disposition of the sewage of towns and cities and to report to the next Legislature their views, with such information as they can obtain upon the subject, from our own or other lands." This was the beginning of the accurate study of a subject that has a personal interest for every man, woman, and child. It has been prosecuted uninterruptedly since, and at the end of nearly two decades, in 1890, it put forth its monumental and authoritative three-volume report, one of which relates to the general work of the board, one to Purification of Sewage and Water, and one to Examination of Water Supplies. Dr. Bowditch had said in 1869, "Public health has so wide a field that help is needed from all—from the chemist, the engineer, the naturalist, and from the humblest citizen as well as the highest statesman." He didn't mention the bacteriologist, because that interesting personage did not exist. He was beginning to be evolved in Pasteur, who was studying the "parasitic diseases of silkworms," and in Tyndall, who was earnestly probing the truth or falsity of the doctrine of "spontaneous generation," but, as we now know many of him, he was non est. No less than four chemists par excellence, one civil engineer, and one professed biologist, outside the regular corps of medical and other contributors, help to make this a work that puts this country in advance of all Europe, and which will find a place in all scientific libraries.
