Fever Infection

Men of science speak of epidemie , naven, and of scarlet fever being ( nnnicated by tlie few drops of milk which yon pour into your tea, or tbc ' creain diffused in a dish of strawberries. J On a late occasion, at a fashionable ] aer party in London, as many as eight or ' ,en gnests, and seven members of the ïouseliold, tooksearletfever. Obviously, .lic infection must have boen caught at ho dinner party ; but how was the puzzling matter of inquiry, for no ono in ,ho family of the host was known to have een aflected with the disorder. Was ;he disoase bronght to the house by a waiter ? Was it conveyed in tho tableinen from the washerwomau ? Was it somohow, incorporated in the cream that ïad been used in the dessert? Aninvestigation on theso and other points, as wo uuderstand, was made, but not with any satisfactory restilt. The cream was thonght to bc the most likely vehicle of infection ; but how could any one be oertain on the point ? The cream employed in fashionable dessert in London is possibly inado up of half a dozen creams from as many dairies, and inquiry ends only in vague conjecture. Eather a hazardous thing, one would say, going out to dinner where you may run the chance of being killed in a manner so very mysterious. People, in their innocence, are not aware of the manaer in wliich contagious diseases may be communicated by Eublic conveyances, by articles of dress, y dwellings, by the very atmosphere. We have jnst heard an instance of tlie communication of scarlet fever by means of a "kist," the name usually given in Scotland to a sorvant's trunk. A servant girl in Morayshire feil ill with scarlet fever and died. Her kist, a painted wooden box, containing all her worldly goods, her later clothing included, was sent home to her relations, and lay for some weeks at a station on the Speyside railway before an opportunity occurred for removing it by a cart to her mother's cottage among the bilis. During this interval the station-master's children, in romping about, conducted their gambols on the kist, which was a repository of contagión, and in due course were struck down with scarlet fever. At lengtb the fatal kist was conveyed to its destination, and the contents were dis}iersed among i friends and neighbors. The donations were kindly meant, but they proved fatal. No precautions had been taken to disinfect the articles, tho result being that wherever the clothes of the deceased girl were taken in, scarlet fever found its victims. For sevcral months the fever raged, nntil the wave of its infection was expended. Now ensued a remarkable event. The outbreak proved to be an opposing barrior to the spread of a more virulent type of scarlatina advancing from another quarter at a later poi iod of the year. On reaching the former scène of the disease, it was arrested for want of material to feed upon, a second