No. 6. 



DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



423 



luted, what are we going to do about it? We must have water and 

 there is no other way to get it.'' One way to remedy this is to 

 use rain water collected in a carefully made cistern; but a better 

 way to my mind is to remove the source of pollution, and this 

 source, in the country, is almost always one thing — the old-fashioned 

 country privy. This should be abolished — the pit filled up and 

 a dry closet substituted. A dry closet consists, as is seen by the 

 drawing, of a pail, a seat and a receptacle for dry earth or sifted 

 coal ashes. When the pail is tilled the contents should be emptied 

 on cultivated land, if near the house, earth should be raked over 

 the pile, but if at all distant this is not actually necessary. Sunlight 

 and the germs in the upper layers of the soil — the nitrifying bacteria 

 they call them — soon dispose of all tilth. 



A Modern Dry Closet — Au arrangement that should be in 

 every farmhouse. 



Some one will complain that a dry closet takes time; so it does, 

 just one and one-half minutes per day is the actual record of an 

 earth closet in a family of live. Surely any one can afford that 

 much time. Another way is to have a cemented pit, throw earth 

 into this every day and every month or so, remove the contents to 

 the fields. All privies and earth closets must, of course, have 

 tightly fitting covers, so as to exclude flies.. 



Another thing to be gotten rid of, is the slop and waste water. In 



