We have seen that all the wooden work, the making of boxes are gene-rally completed outside of the factory. The operators are consequently strangers to the questions of hygiene and pathology, and as they occupy about half of the men employed in this fabrication, it results that half of the total number are out of the conditions of insalubrity of this kind of manufacture.

Inside of the factory, by allowing separate rooms for every operation, five-sixths of the men escape the influence of the noxious vapors. Thus, the filling of the presses, which takes four-fifths of the women, can be made in special rooms.

We have now to examine the room in which the mastic is made, the one in which they dip, the oven, and at last, the dismounting of the presses, and the packing or boxing.

The atmosphere of these rooms is more or less intensely altered by the vapors proceeding either from the paste intended for the dipping, or by the packs of matches already saturated with the chemical mastic.

The grinding of the substances, and the pre-paration of the mastic do not require a continual attendance. One man can work it; besides, these operations are done in the open air, and it is about the same for the oven, near which the men do not remain. It is not the same for the dipping shop, and principally the rooms occupied by the women who dismount the presses, and those who box or pack the matches.

A stranger, who enters this part of the factory, is struck by the emanations which exhale. The air is often thick, principally in the room where the presses are dismounted, and if he remains for some time, he begins to cough. After a certain time, the system becomes accustomed to that particular atmosphere; and nearly all the women cough only daring damp weather, and principally when the air is not renewed, the vapors accumulating, and becoming too thick.