ic schools
with this poison, the affair is somewhat different. Yet, as far as the
Charleston Board of School Commissioners has felt constrained to go, up
to date, is this: they have written to the City Physician asking that
"occasional inspection" of the cisterns be made, and decorating their
absurd request with ornamental platitudes.

With sewage it is the same situation. There is, indeed, a primitive
sewer system in part of the city. But any attempt to extend it meets
with a determined and time-rooted opposition. The Charlestonians are
afraid of sewer-gas, but apparently have no fear of the filth which
generates sewer-gas; said filth accumulating in Charleston's streets,
subject only to the attention of the dissipated-looking buzzards, which
are one of the conservative and local features of the place. I have seen
these winged scavengers at work. It is not an appetizing sight. But with
one exception they afford the only example of unofficial effort toward
the betterment of sanitary conditions, that I witnessed in Charleston.
The other came from a policeman, patiently poking with his club at the
vent of one of the antediluvian sewers, which had--as usual--become
blocked. Yet, despite public indifference and opposition, Dr. Green,
without any special training or brilliant ability as a sanitarian, is,
by dogged, fighting persistency lowering the death-rate of his city.

There is also a non-medical legislator to whom Charleston owes a debt of
unacknowledged gratitude. Mr. James Cosgrove succeeded in getting the
Charleston Neck marshes, wherein breeds the malaria-mosquito, drained.
Since then the death rate from malaria, which was nothing less than
scandalous, has dwindled to proportions that are almost respectable--if,
indeed, it were respectable to permit any deaths from an easily
destructible nuisance like the mosquito. Nearly all our cities, by the
way, are curiously indifferent to the depredations of this man-eater.
Suppose, for an example, that Trenton, New Jersey, were suddenly beset
by a brood of copperhead snakes, which killed, let us say, two or three
people a week and dangerously poisoned ten times that number. What an
anti-snake campaign there would be in that aroused and terrified
community! Well, that much more dangerous wild creature, the Anopheles
mosquito, in a recent year slew more than 100 people in Savannah,
Georgia, without arousing any public resentment. And Jacksonville's home
brood in 1901 slaughter