54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



there is the water from kitchens containing vegetable, animal, and other 

 refuse, and that from wash-houses containing soap and the animal mat- 

 ter from soiled linen. There is also the drainage from stables and cow- 

 houses, and that from slaughter-houses containing animal and vegetable 

 offal. In cases where privies and cesspools are used instead of water- 

 closets, or these are not connected with sewers, there is a still larger 

 proportion of human refuse in the form of chamber-slops and urine. 

 In fact, sewage cannot be looked upon as composed solely of human 

 excrement diluted with water, but as water mixed with a vast variety of 

 matters, some held in suspension, some in solution." In fact, were Ave to 

 fall into the habit of looking upon it and calling it 2^oiso7i, instead of 

 sewage, and treating it as we do any other poison, one step, at least, 

 will have been taken on the high-road to safety. Surely no civilized 

 community ought knowingly to use water polluted, no matter in what 

 degree, with such filth as this. 



Denton says that from the report on the " Army and Navy Diet 

 Scales " he finds that " the estimated quantity of liquid of all kinds 

 drunk in the two services averages 187|^ gallons per head per annum, 

 or about two quarts per day. Though this quantity is drunk by adults 

 of the male sex, it is some criterion of the quantity drunk by men, 

 women, and children, and it will not be wrong to assume that two- 

 thirds, or 125 gallons per head, is as much as is actually consumed by 

 a mixed population in a year. Dr. Parkes says that an adult requires 

 daily from seventy to one hundred ounces (three and a half to five pints) 

 for nutrition, but about twenty to thirty ounces of this quantity are 

 sometimes in the solid food." This is what we daily put in our mouths, 

 and it certainly should be pure and sweet. In fact, one way or an- 

 other, we are pretty much all water. It is said that " the model man 

 weighs 154 pounds, of which 116 is water and only 38 pounds dry 

 matter ; " based on which fact, Edmond About has written a curious 

 romance, "The Man with the Broken Ear." Water, then, is of all 

 things the one most essential to our existence, and if three-quarters of 

 our very bodies and a large part of our daily food are composed of this 

 element, then, like Caesar's wife, it should be " clear even of suspicion." 



Although, perhaps, there is no special occasion for it in this con- 

 nection, attention is invited, in the interest of accuracy, to the popular 

 misuse of the term " water-shed." ' It is ordinarily employed to denote 

 the area collecting the rainfall, and comprised between the highest and 

 lowest points. Properly speaking, a " water-shed " is " the anticlinal 

 ridge separating one river-basin from another." The highest crest-line 

 of a ridge, therefore, is the icater-shed / the lowest area in the valley 

 up to the highest water-level is the water-basin / while the area between 

 these (miscalled the water-shed) ma.y be termed the " gathering-ground," 

 or the " collecting slopes." 



