78 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERT. 



From this cylinder the air is exhausted by a steam engine. It is then 

 taken to the premises, where the sink is to be emptied, and a large 

 air-tight hose, with one end screwed to the machine in the street, is 

 carried through the house, if there is no alley-way, and the other end 

 inserted in the sink. When all is ready the valve is opened, and as 

 " nature abhors a vacuum " she makes haste to fill it. The hose is 

 then unscrewed, and a cap put on ; the full cylinder is driven off, and 

 an empty one takes its place, which in five minutes is full and ready 

 to give place to another, and so on till the sink is exhausted of all its 

 liquid contents, and with it nearly all the effluvia, the force of the 

 suction being so strong that if the vault is pretty tight it will be com- 

 pletely exhausted of its fetid air, so that if necessary to remove the 

 contents which are too solid to be taken up through the hose, the work 

 can be done in a few minutes. 



The Pneumatic Company have daily, or rather nightly, in operation 

 six of the above described machines, which average about nine loads 

 a day, of 45 cubic feet each, making 54 loads, or 2,430 cubic feet of 

 the semi-liquid contents of privy vaults ; every gallon of which ought 

 to go to the country and be sprinkled upon the cultivated fields ; 

 instead of which it is all discharged off the end of piers into the Hud- 

 son River. 



To show the amount of fertilizing materials collected, and for the 

 most part wasted, within the city of New York, we quote from a 

 report of the City Inspector. In a communication to the Board of 

 Aldermen, he stated, "that within two months, of the spring of 1853, 

 six thousand nine hundred and fifty loads of night soil were removed 

 from the various parts of the city and emptied overboard from the 

 four piers used as dumping places ; and I am informed that besides 

 seventy-six thousand eight hundred and forty-five loads of dirt, fifty- 

 five thousand four hundred and ninety-three loads of manure have 

 been collected by the Street Department, during the same period. 



TOBACCO PRESSING MACHINE. 



An ingenious machine for the compressing of Tobacco into plugs, 

 was exhibited at the New York Crystal Palace, by Mr. A. A. Parker 

 of St. Louis. The tobacco is received into a hopper, then carried 

 forward, and fed into moulds or cells in a rotary disc box, in which it 

 is pressed into plugs by toggle jointed levers, and from which it is 

 discharged in plugs, into a receiving long pressure box, where all the 

 elasticity of the compressed tobacco is destroyed, and the plugs ren- 

 dered incapable of swelling again, and from which they are discharged, 

 firm and permanent in packing shape and size. Means are also 

 employed in this press to keep the moulds or cells, and all the contact 

 parts of the machine, clean and free from the gum and liquorice of 

 the tobacco. The compressing box into which the plugs are dis- 

 charged from the moulds or cells, embraces a principle essential to the 

 success of a tobacco-pressing machine. If the tobacco was freely dis- 

 charged when quickly pressed into plugs, it soon would lose its form 



