"Odour of Sanctity"

The crowded underground shelters of London have many drawbacks. One is that they stink. Another is that the air in them is laden with germs. Last week in the Lancet, Scientists Charles Claud Twort and A. H. Baker of the Portslade Laboratories in Sussex came out for an old-fashioned way of doing away with disagreeable smells which is a newfangled way of doing away with germs: burning incense.

Ordinary pungent incense smoke, said they, kills many kinds of nose and throat germs. Next best disinfectant is smoldering cardboard, damped with a two percent solution of potassium nitrate and dried.

Commented the Lancet, arch in the midst of bombs: "It is a strange turn of the wheel which has revealed antiseptic properties in the odour of sanctity."

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