Of the $82,506.49 received in consequence of the smallpox epidemic, $33,240.15 were paid to the City Treasurer, just previous to the beginning of the last financial year.

Nearly all of this sum was received from the State, and it involved the labor of investigating the settlement of more than 1,200 cases, many of whom had lived in various parts of the State. It was necessary to prove in each case, to the satisfaction of the Board of State Charities, that the patient was a State pauper. In all cases where satisfactory evidence was not obtained, payment was refused.

In connection with this statement it seems proper to acknowledge the courtesy of Dr. H. B. Wheelwright, agent of the Board of State Charities, whose patience must have been much taxed at our importunities.

ON THE VENTILATION OF BOSTON SCHOOL-HOUSES.

BY E. W. DRAPER, M. D.,

ASSISTED BY

PROF. WILLIAM RIPLEY NICHOLS,

Of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Forty-five thousand children in Boston attend the public schools. To promote the objects of the beneficent system by which instruction is given freely to these children, many school-houses have been built. In numerous instances these buildings are monuments of municipal liberality. Great and reasonable pride is manifested concerning them by our people, and visitors from abroad, the guests of the city, are asked to recognize them as models of their kind. Miniature fac-similes and other representations of them are sent to international exhibitions, where they may compete with those designed elsewhere. If there is any department in which, more than in others, the City Government has consistently shown an unselfish policy, it is in the department of the public schools, and it is greatly to the credit of Boston that this city has come to be recognized as a leader in fostering a generously endowed system of public instruction.

But, in the execution of these designs by which Boston appears to have attained such an enviable place among cities, has all been done that could be done, wisely and economically, in the direction of the sanitary arrangements of the school-buildings? In the efforts to provide unrivalled

accommodations and appliances for developing sound minds in the city youth, has the equally important necessity for maintaining sound bodies been duly considered? In the plans for the construction of new buildings, or the remodelling of older ones, and in the mechanical execution of those plans, has sufficient attention been given to the important matters of ventilation and warming? Do the forty-five thousand school children get the best that the city can give in this respect, do they, indeed, receive in reality the full measure of benefit which the buildings themselves seem designed to bestow in regard to wholesome air?

For the solution of these important questions, investigations were undertaken the present year by the Board of Health, and the report of these investigations, under the instructions of the Board, is herewith presented. The subject is one of obvious interest to the people of Boston; for surely every intelligent parent must feel a lively concern about the air which, during a considerable part of each day, his children, temporarily removed from his immediate guardianship, are compelled to breathe in the public school-rooms. He will be very likely to reason that if the general good sanctions and justifies, as it surely does, a regulation which, with kindly firmness, gathers the youth of a community into the public schools, the private welfare of each individual pupil demands that any influences or conditions, in connection with such schools, that have the power to impair health or to compromise vigor, shall be reduced to the lowest possible degree of activity, or that they shall be removed wholly. Looking at the matter still more broadly, the city itself should feel a vigilant solicitude concerning the subject, a consistent purpose to provide and maintain the best means that can be found to preserve the physical integrity of those whose mental training it undertakes to guide. These children, each day the city's wards for the time being, are to be, not many years hence, the men and women who will give