MKCIIANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 59 



its salt to the brine in the bag, and so the process goes on, the beef 

 expanding like a sponge, anil gradually taking up a great part of the 

 natural juice that it had previously lost in the salting process. In this 

 way no loss of juice is sustained by steeping, and the brine; left in the 

 bags, after a nightly dialysis in fresh water, can be used for soup. 



Thoroughly salted beef, without bone, takes up nearly one-third its 

 weight of juice, and this absorption takes place gradually as the 

 strength of the brine in the tlialyser becomes reduced. 



Meat thus treated being, in fact, fresh meat may bo cooked in 

 a variety of ways that are obviously not available for salt meat; and 

 so the food of sailors, and consequently their health, may be improved. 



INDUSTRY OF MANURES, 



Mr. A. W. Hoffman, the well-known English Chemist, as a Juror 

 of the great London Exhibition of 1862, has recently published a re- 

 port under the above title, from which we make the following extracts. 



After alluding to the great impulse given to the cause of sanitary 

 iv Form in Great Britain by the. sudden outburst of the cholera in that 

 country, in 1836, he calls attention to the controversy which took 

 place among the various authorities respecting the proper size and 

 form of drains to be used in connection with dwelling-houses. 



Small circular stoneware tubes were recommended by one party ; 

 large brick tlat-bottonied sewers by the other. The tubular system 

 happily proved to be the cheapest as well as the best; and its advo- 

 cates, after a ten years' struggle, finally carried the clay. Whole 

 towns are now drained through 12-inch pipes, which would formerly 

 have been deemed of scant dimension for the drainage of a single 

 mansion. 



The application of the manurial streams from urban drains to 

 irrigate farm lands was also warmly advocated by the sanitary re- 

 formers, but as warmly declared impracticable by several leading en- 

 gineers, whose views upon that part of the question prevailed. 



The second invasion of Asiatic cholera, in 1849, gave a new 

 impulse to the abolition of cesspools ; and the value of tubular 

 drains, of small size and rapid scour, for their replacement, had by 

 that time obtained very general recognition. But the leading engi- 

 neers of England, while admitting, theoretically, the value of sewage 

 to fertilize land, still denied the soundness and economy of the 

 mechanical arrangements proposed by the sanitary reformers for its 

 distribution. On an engineering question, public opinion (not unnat- 

 urally) sided at the outset with the engineers, The new system has 

 Iiad, therefore, to encounter a professional opposition, all the more 

 formidable for being thoroughly conscientious. Probably that opposi- 

 tion, with the controversy it has engendered, and, above all, the 

 experiments to which it has given rise, constitutes ^a wholesome 

 ordeal to test the soundness of the new plan, and to bring about the 

 correction of such weak points as it may present. But, in the mean- 

 time, the application of town sewage to farm lands on an extensive 

 national scale, has stood, and still stands, adjourned. 



Hence the present condition, obviously transitional, of the great 

 manufacturing and commercial towns of England ; hence the insuffer- 

 able pollution of her streams and rivers; hence that prodigious 



