and seem to hinder the propagation of the germs of disease, the city must long ago have been visited with plague, and perhaps have been rendered absolutely uninhabitable. And, even under existing circumstances, the average duration of life in the city of Mexico is estimated to be but 26.4 years. Typhoid fever prevails all the year round, and is especially virulent at the end of the dry season, when the heat is the greatest. And, surprising as it may seem, with a climate of perpetual spring and an elevation of 7,500 feet above the sea-level, lung and malarial diseases hold a prominent place among the causes of death. According to the reports of the Board of Health of the Mexican capital for April and May of the present year (1886), thirty-three per cent of the weekly mortality at that season was to be referred to typhoid and other forms of gastric fever, and twenty per cent to consumption and pneumonia. In the year 1877, when a typhus epidemic prevailed, the city's mortality was reported to have been as high as 53.2 per thousand as compared with an average death-rate of 24.6 in Paris for the same year. "A distinguished member of the medical faculty of Mexico has lately published a report, in which he demonstrates, by comparative statistical tables, that the annual mortality of the city is increasing
