Drainage For Health

The proper drainage of buildings is a matter of great itnportance. Cellars may be wet, stables not very dry, water may drip froni the eaves, cuttiqg holes into the earth and making puddles. The water l'roru such puddles filters directly into the cellar, so that oíd house ia the country are very frequently dangerous to life on aooount of the water settling into the cellars. A damp cellar may sometimes be made dry by making a sink in it. Cellars are sometimes made in such wretched places that they need drain pipes to carry off tho water. In arranging any of this kind of work about a atable, it is nocessary to be caref ui that the drainings of the stable do not filter into any water required for domestic use. Water should on no account be allowed to drip from the eaves ; it is a great nuisance, underïnining foundations and rapidly destroying buildings. Air confined any where, even in a olean room, becomes offensive, probably unhealthy, with a disagreoable smell of closeness, and confined in a drain or sewer, it must be infinitely worse. Drains built tight, with traps, etc, so that thero is no ventilation of their interior, genérate very poisonous gases, which are ready on the ocourrence of any small leak to escape and poison everybody who happens to go near them. The best arrangement tor ventilators in houses is to hare a separate fluo built in the chimney stack expressly to receive the ventilator pipes. - Thus the air from the drain is discharged high in the atmosphere in a position to be mixed with smoke ; and the noxious properties are destroyed, the smoke, whether of wood or coal, containing about the best chemical disinfectants known. In all parts of New England hundreds of people are dying erery year of typhoid fever ; a large tract of the city of Boston is now building on made land nearly as flat as the prairies around Chicago ; and in a few years it will doubtless have to be regraded and rebuilt to get rid of this pestilence. From Maiuo to Fennsylvania there are flat, undrained fields, and wet cellars nearly as bad. All over the country further south, but principally in the Mississippi valley and the flat country bordering the ooean, the half-drained land is infeoted with the intermittent fever and the other malarial pestilenoeg to such an extent as to destroy many thousands of people every year ; so that, in spite of constant immigration, extensive tracts of country are about as sparsely peopled as they were when PoCahontas