SANITATION AT CAPE TOWN.

By H. C. KINGS MILL, M.A.

[Abstract.]

CAPE TOWN occupies a plain about a mile in width between the bay and Table Mountain. This plain stretches round the bay in the form of a horse-shoe, several miles in length. The original water-supply was taken from the little River Riebeck, and this stream is still used by the native women for the clothes of the community, and receives the drainage of a continuous chain of suburbs extending from Cape Town to Wynberg, which have uncontrolled access to it without any system of sewerage. The water is now, consequently, totally unfit for human consumption. The present watersupply is of good quality, derived from the higher levels of the mountain, and giving pressure enough to be utilised for electric lighting. The average daily consumption of water is about 30 gallons a head, or 2,000,000 gallons a day. The collecting area is limited, and the rainfall upon it varies from 46 to 62 inches a year, with an annual evaporation at the Molteno reservoir of 61 inches. The total expenditure on waterworks is £234,000 for the last ten years. In Cape Town the Municipality have laid down sewerage works at a total cost of £270,000 during the same period. There are still 550 houses in Cape Town undrained--exclusive of the suburbs above-mentioned; and £3500 a year is spent on the carting away of night-soil.

There are incomplete works at Port Elizabeth for sewering the town, but they have been discontinued on account of insufficient water-supply.

In Durban there are waterworks furnishing over 44 gallons of water a head for domestic use; and about half the houses are drained in connection with the public sewers.

At Johannesberg the water-supply is very inadequate, so no attempt can be made to sewer the town. Part of the houses are furnished with closets with movable pails, and an introduction has been made of the Liernur pneumatic system. It is described as very successful, not only in Johannesberg, but also at Madras, Amsterdam, Leyden, and Trouville; and a description is given of the working of the system.

SOME EXPERIENCES OF QUARANTINE.

By C. F. PONDER, M.B., C.M., Edin

[Abstract.]

IF quarantine could be enforced in an absolute way, it might secure a community from the invasion of certain dreaded diseases. But in practice it is found to be impossible to enforce a complete quarantine. Examples of this were given from the writer's experience, showing how failure came in owing to the presence of unguarded loopholes by which the disease might leak past.

Quarantine to be effective must be complete: practically we must isolate ourselves from the rest of the worldpassengers, vessels, goods, even letters requiring to be dis infected before admittance. To do this thoroughly, is impossible, because the appliances and trained officials are not available the expense so enormous as to be prohibitiveand even when not successful, the germs of disease in some mysterious way are found to leak past, an epidemic of smallpox threatens. The only preventative known for this disease is vaccination and revaccination. The value of vaccination is illustrated by the case of Germany. There vaccination is compulsory before the end of the second year of life, and revaccination during the school age. The result is that Germany is free from epidemic of smallpoxthe few cases that occur being almost entirely on the frontiers of badly vaccinated countries. The town deathrate from smallpox in 1899 in England was 42-fold, in Austria was 67-fold. in Belguim was 174-fold, and in France was 231-fold, that of German towns.

The value of revaccination is illustrated by the 1901 epidemic of smallpox in Glasgow. Here within a few weeks nearly half a million persons were revaccinated and not one of these took smallpox.

Old objections to vaccination have ceased to have force. Now only calf-lymph is used-so risk of infection from unhealthy children is avoided. Operation of vaccination is practically painless, and, with the rarest exceptions, successful. A protected community is preferable to quarantine.

AN

ACCOUNT OF THE WORK OF THE BRITISH CONGRESS ON TUBERCULOSIS. By MISS C. L. MONTEFIORE.

SECTION J.

MENTAL SCIENCE AND EDUCATION.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS.

By PROFESSOR ARNOLD WALL, M.A.,

POETRY AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION.

THE subject of my present paper is one of such wide importance and interest, and seems to me to bear so deeply and strongly and in so many different directions upon the springs of character and conduct, that my chief difficulty in treating it is to compress what I must say upon the subject into the limits allotted me. I have thought it best, there fore, to narrow the field somewhat by dealing with a concrete case first. I do not think that in doing this I shall lose anything by taking the case of a man of such exceptional experience in the matter of education as John Stuart Mill. His is, it is true, an extreme case; but I think that the study of it will tend to throw my subject into very strong relief, and thus to make its treatment easier for myself and my hearers.

Mill tells us in his Autobiography that he became a prey, at the age of twenty, to a strange mental disease, a hideous apathetic melancholy, which he can only describe in the words of Coleridge:

"A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear;
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief

In word or sigh or tear.

He describes how a small ray of light broke in upon his gloom from reading a passage in Marmontel's Memoirs, and how this brought him some relief. It hardly concerns us to inquire what this passage was; it is sufficient to say that it moved him to tears. Nor do I intend to dwell upon the first of the two lessons which Mill tells us he learned from this terrible experience of his youth; it is sufficient to observe that Mill now found himself to be the victim of a

very extraordinary system of education which had been imposed upon him by his father-an education wholly intellectual and non-emotional, and one tending to develop in an abnormal degree the power and the habit of analysis.

What concerns us here is Mill's Second Lesson, and here I must allow him to speak for himself:

The other important change which my opinions at this time underwent was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and action. I had now learned by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided." He goes on to say that he "never turned recreant to intellectual culture," but he realised that the power and practice of analysis, though an essential condition of improvement, had consequences which required to be corrected by joining other kinds of cultiva tion with it. "The cultivation of the feelings," he says, became one of the cardinal points of my ethical and philosophical creed." Very significant for us is the sentence which follows: I now began to find meaning in the things which I had read and heard about the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture."

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When Mill had thus been painfully convinced of the necessity of the culture of the feelings, he turned to music and poetry. His experience in music is interesting and amusing, and is often quoted, but does not concern us here. The first permanent relief he obtained. he tells us, from reading Wordsworth. He had tried Byron at the worst period of his depression, and got no good from him, "but the reverse." Wordsworth exactly suited his condition. This poet had himself passed through a very similar crisis, as recorded in the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood," and also Wordsworth addressed himself to what had always been one of the strongest of Mill's pleasurable susceptibilities" the love of rural objects and natural scenery." But this was not the chief benefit which Mill derived from him. What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling and of thought coloured by feeling under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source

of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings

From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed; and I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence . The result was that I gradually but completely emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it."

The case which I have here sketched in Mill's words should have many lessons for us. Allowing for the peculiar constitution of the subject's fine mind, and for the abnormal conditions of that mind at the moment when Wordsworth first touched it, we may at least draw one general conclusion, namely: That if education be directed too exclusively towards the cultivation of the intellectual faculties of the mind, so that the emotional faculties are neglected, very disastrous results may follow; and I would add: The finer the mind, and the more delicate its susceptibilities, the greater is the danger of ruin to the growing soul. Leaving aside all the other lessons which may be drawn from Mill's case (even for the present the interesting question of Wordsworth's wonderful "healing power" and its sources), I have here a firm basis for some remarks on poetry as an instrument for the cultivation of the emotional side of human nature; and, I may say, I think that in an age when socalled scientific" culture is showing such a strong tendency to oust the "humaner" system of education, too much stress can hardly be laid upon this view of my subject. Poetry, I would say, is soul-food; of mind-food I suppose we shall always have enough and to spare. Intellectual repletion is synonymous with soul-starvation; and I think I have now said enough to indicate a rock ahead.

I must now clear my way a little by describing briefly what I refer to as education in this paper. I have thought that two kinds of education may be pretty clearly distinguished—the haphazard and the systematic; and again two kinds-education for character and education for intellect. (Education for a special purpose-technical or professional education I must omit altogether to consider.) I think, too, that my double classification may turn out to be really one. By the haphazard kind of education I mean (using an extreme term to characterise it) that kind of education which has been in vogue in England, with some not very radical changes and natural growths, from the sixteenth century to the present day, or, rather, yesterday. It is that inconsistent, apparently ill-organised, mainly "classical"