T. M Clark. Boston. Mass., writes:

"I should like to know how long it is since the health authorities of Newton, Mass., began to discourage the use of house traps, as your Pittsburg correspondent states in your issue of December 2, 1893. Five years ago 1 built two houses in that town. I agree with you in every point on the subject of house traps, believing that, with good plumbing inside, a detached country house, draining only into its own cesspool, is better off without a main trap, which is sure sooner or latter to be stopped with grease or rags, and flood the basement with sewage. Accordingly I laid the drains of these houses without main traps. The Board of Health made a complaint against me, and although they were polite enough to consider the arguments that I submitted to them, compelled me to dig up the drains, and put in main traps, both of which have since been choked with rags so as to discharge the sewage from the upper stories over the basement floor by the way of the basement water-closet, causing a great deal of trouble in both houses. Within the past two years the city sewers have been begun and are partly in use. Is it since then that the Board of Health have begun to discourage the use of main traps? If so I shall come into collision with them again if I build any more houses there. Objectionable as it is to have main traps get stopped, I consider that the risk of this, where houses drain into a sewer, is less to be feared than the risk of infection from disease germs entering the sewers from other nouses. I read to-day in the papers that there was an epidemic of scarlet fever and diphtheria in Newton. If the Board of Health has really encouraged or allowed the omission of traps between the sewers and the houses, or schoolhouses, I am not surprised."

[We presume the regulations were modified to suit the new conditions arising from the introduction of a sewerage system in 1890-91.]