MECHANICS AND USEFUL AUTS. Gl 



A third party believed gravitation to be the only economical distribu- 

 tive power for sewage, and open gutters contoured along the undu- 

 lating ground the only eluumel suited lor its conveyance. 



On these mechanical questions the Reporter, as a chemist, has of 

 course no opinion to oiFer. But, that the reckless squandering of town 

 sewage to the sea, if continued on its present prodigious scale, must, 

 in a few generations, justify the worst forebodings of Liebig, and that 

 the same steam-power which h;is induced the evil can alone supply the 

 remedy, the Reporter confidently believes. 



And here, perhaps, is the place to interpose a few remarks, in most 

 respectful deprecation of the support which Liebig, in several of his 

 works, and more especially in his latest publication, affords to the 

 cesspool system of urban defecation. He devotes an entire chapter 

 (the seventh) to a description of the movable cesspools, or casks upon 

 wheels, employed in the soldiers' barracks, in several garrison towns 

 of Baden to receive and carry away the whole, of the ejecta, fluid and 

 solid. He states the average cost of these cesspool-carts to be be- 

 tween and 10 apiece ; their term of duration about five years ; 

 and their maintenance-charge about Id per cent of their first cost. 

 He adds that the sale of the manure collected and conveyei.l away 

 in these carts, from several garrisons, numbering in all 8,000 men, 

 brings in an annually increasing sum; the receipts having risen from 

 285 in 1852 to 080 in 1858, and the tendency of the price being 

 upward still. Upon this system lie bestows encomiums, made weigh- 

 ty by his illustrious name and eminent authority. " Sandy wastes,' 1 

 he says, "more particularly in the vicinity ofBastadt and Carlsrahc, 

 have thus been turned into cornfields of great fertility. And he adds 



VJ * 



that " there might thus be established a perfect circulation of the con- 

 ditions of life, which would provide 8,000 men with bread year after 

 year, without in the least reducing the productiveness of the fields on 

 which the corn is grown." He further devotes much space in his 

 Appendix to a report upon Japanese husbandry, addressed to the 

 Minister of Agriculture at Berlin, by Dr. H. Maron, and containing 

 a detailed account of the Japanese method of urban defecation, which 

 is also accomplished by a system of movable cesspools, lifted out and 

 carried through the open streets by hand. 



The Japanese, Dr. Maron states, use open privies, not constructed 

 as in Germany, in some remote corner of the yard, but forming an 

 essential part of the interior of their dwellings. The aperture is level 

 with the ground, and beneath it is set a bucket or earthen pot for re- 

 moval, when full, by human hands. The Coolies thus employed are 

 to be met, he tells us, of an evening, inarching in long strings along 

 all the roads leading out of the Japanese towns, each Coolie bearing 

 two buckets or earthen pots of nieht-soil for conveyance to the neia'h- 



i n? <r^ 



boring farm. Caravans of pack-horses, similarly laden, are sent, he 

 states, 200 or oOO miles into the interior; and canal-boats leave each 

 town daily as regularly as the mail, each loaded by Coolies with high- 

 piled buckets of the precious stuff, the effluvia of which, it is admitted, 

 render the task of conducting these barges " a species of martyrdom. 11 

 It is precisely from this degrading and loathsome kind of drudgery 

 that England is now resolutely bent on emancipating mankind ; while 

 yet restoring to the land (mite as faithfully as the Japanese, the fer- 

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