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—We make no apology for having occupied a part of the space allotted to proceedings of medical societies in several preceding numbers of the Journal, with the very interesting and important paper of Dr. Barnes and the discussion thereon in the Section on Practice of Medicine and Hygiene of the Suffolk District Medical Society, Mass. The subject there discussed, namely, how best to dispose of the excretions and refuse necessarily accompanying the aggregation of human beings into families and communities of fixed location, is perhaps the most important of all the sanitary problems that are now demanding the attention of the profession. The progress of civilization has demonstrated no one thing more clearly, than that soil and water contaminated by the presence in them of such excretory and refuse matter, are capable of engendering several of the most distressing and fatal diseases we have to encounter. And yet such