A very effective letter, signed " F.R.S.," in Wednesday's Times,
shows how extremely unlikely it is that the famous "muzzling order" which was adopted first in London at the end of 1885, produced what was called the "splendid suc- cess" of the fall in the number of deaths from hydrophobia from twenty-seven in 1885 to nine in 1886. The fact was that the deaths from hydrophobia had always varied in the most arbitrary way. In 1884 the deaths from hydrophobia in London had been precisely nine, as they also were in 1886; but there had been no muzzling order in force in 1884. Of the twenty-seven deaths in 1885, twenty-six had happened in the first eleven months, when no muzzling order was in force. There was only one in December of that year, and that must have been due to a bite suffered in the previous months, and a muzzling order issued only on December 4th could not have taken effect to prevent deaths in the same month. The truth evidently is that the cause of the increase in 1885 (just like the cause of the increase in 1877, when the deaths were con- siderably more numerous than those in 1885), whatever it may have been, ceased to operate in 1886, just as it ceased to operate in 1S78. The muzzling had nothing to do with it.
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