50 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ■ 



Sewage-Farming " as stated by the First Rivers Pollution Commission 

 of England, and reprinted, with much other valuable information ap- 

 pertaining, in the " Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Health 

 for 1876 " (pages 276-408), in a paper by Dr. C. F. Folsom, on " The 

 Disposal of Sewage." Many modes of " disposal " are herein described, 

 but such " disposal " as this — sowing pestilence broadcast — was never 

 contemplated by any one. Of course it can be prevented, but it is not 

 proposed to discuss that matter now. 



Now, these organically manured slopes are, many of them, very 

 steep, varying, by actual measurement, from one in seven to one in fifty, 

 and flatter. When the heavy rains of spring and fall occur, the effluent 

 water from those slopes is dilute sewage, dilute human excrement, and, 

 especially if the land has been recently ploughed, a large quantity of 

 the surface-soil, and with it the freshly-applied Imman excreta, and the 

 remaining noxious parts of the previously-applied batch of filth still 

 present in the soil, must necessarily be, and is, washed down-hill and 

 into the water-supply of the town. The English scientific periodical 

 Engineering records that, early in the spring of 1876, " the piers of 

 Vauxhall Bridge were coated with a covering of upward of a foot deep 

 of soil, brought down from the upper portion of the Thames during one 

 tide, and this minor instance is but a slight indication of the enormous 

 deposits cast into our (British) rivers through the washing of the sur- 

 face-soil from the adjacent fields. . . . The water, before being drawn 

 into the Thames companies' reservoirs, was loaded consequently with 

 soil, manure, sewage, and every imaginable abomination that newly 

 ploughed and manured fields and towns could supply." 



Of course, this pollution was on a larger scale than could occur in 

 the case here treated. Nevertheless, if the quantity of polluting mat- 

 ter be less, so is the volume of water polluted, hence the proportion of 

 foulment may be approximately the same. At any rate the fact re- 

 mains that the water is contaminated, and, as has been already shown, 

 infinitesimal may be quite as fatal as profuse pollution. 



The elements that go to make dilute sewage unfit for assimilation 

 in man, especially fit it for plant-food, a fact well known to every gar- 

 dener. Dr. Folsom says that " a celebrated horticulturist in Brighton, 

 England, dilutes his manure until it has neither taste nor smell." If 

 such attenuated " barn-yard cofibe " can have manurial efi'ect on vege- 

 tation, what physiological efi'ect — pathologic and hygienic — would it 

 be likely to have when employed as a beverage ? This very question 

 is answered in a report to the English " General Board of Health " 

 in 1856, the substance of which is as follows : "... It is now gener- 

 ally admitted that the substances which constitute the organic matter 

 of water act injuriously, b}^ no means (necessarily) in consequence of 

 being poisonous themselves, but by undergoing those great processes 

 of transformation called decay and putrefaction, to which all vegetable 

 and animal matter is subject, when no longer under the control of vi- 



