of the facts of the case--facts sufficiently obvious to be
perceptible to any person of intelligence, and the nature of which is
so well understood as to be accepted at once as bearing closely upon
the subject in question.

And first, as to climate. Considering that the cholera, from which
Munich suffers more at every visitation than almost any other European
city, and typhus, which is always at home within its limits, are not,
properly speaking, climatal diseases, it would seem at first sight
unnecessary to consider the situation of Munich in this respect. But
while the principal object of the present paper is to indicate the
causes of the above-mentioned plagues, the fact should not be lost
sight of that nearly all known diseases flourish in this unfortunate
city, many of them owing to its exceptionally bad climate, while the
sudden and extreme changes of temperature which occur in every season
of the year have a tendency to aggravate those ills which find their
sources in more preventable conditions.

Munich stands upon a high, barren plain, sixteen hundred feet above
the level of the sea, exposed to the full power of the sun in summer,
brooded over by chilly fogs in spring and autumn, and swept the whole
year through by all the storms that accumulate upon the mountains
filling the horizon to the south and east. The air is mountain-air,
_minus_ the aroma and stimulus of evergreen forests, and _plus_ the
miasma of miles of marsh and peat-land and the foulnesses of the city
exhalations. It is the thin air of a high elevation, pleasantly
bracing to persons so fortunate as to possess nerves of iron and lungs
of leather, but extremely irritating to sensitive brains and delicate
chests, and too exhausting, after a time, in its demands upon the most
abundant vitality. It is the boast of certain physicians in Munich
that consumption is rare in that city, but the weekly report of deaths
would seem to contradict this assertion. Certain it is that diseases
of the throat and lungs are very common, especially during the spring,
and that all the rest of the year the whole population suffers more or
less from catarrh. Perhaps if there be less of consumption than one
would expect to find in such a climate, it is because those who would
otherwise be its victims are carried off early by acute inflammation
of the implicated organs. "Of course, if these die in the beginning,
they cannot die at a later period," as a recent medical writ