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THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



to Mr. Duncan, by whom the use of this costly irrigating 

 apparatus is confined to the washing-ia of artificial manures 

 into the roots of a few acres of Italian rye grass. Such was 

 the present condition of the celebrated Myremill farm, Mr. 

 James Kennedy having lost Myremill farm, came to England, 

 and he believed he had done worse here than in Scotland, 



Mf. Mechi : He had no irrigation. 



Mr. Sidney continued: Mr. Mechi seemed to know more 

 about the matter than he did, which made his silence about 

 Myremill failure more odd. Cunning Park, another of the 

 famous liquid manure farms, described by Mr. Morton in 

 glowing terms, has utterly ruined the owner, Mr. Telfer, 

 although admirably managed, as far as quality of dairy produce 

 went. Mr. Telfer had a good bu siness as a merchant : he has 

 failed paid an extremely small dividend, and the farm has, 

 of course, been sold. For two years before the bankruptcy, 

 and consequent sale of Cunning Park, the principal part of 

 the farm was devoted to growing early potatoes for the Glas- 

 gow market ; cf course without the use of liquid manure. 

 Now, he thought they would all agree with him that he had 

 proved all that he undertook to prove at the outset (Hear, 

 hear.) He had shown that after sixteen years of official ex- 

 hortation and amateur farming, no pumping liquid-manure 

 farm had paid a profit, and no practical farmer had followed 

 the path which Mr. Mechi praised, but did not follow. He 

 would conclude by reading a very important document bearing 

 on this question. It was a letter from Mr. Thomes Hawksley, 

 who held a first-rate position as a practical and scientific 

 hydraulic eugineer. That gentleman had paid great attention 

 to this subject. 



Mr. Mechi: You have heard, gentlemen, what Mr. 

 Hawksley says previously; I brought it before you, 



Mr. Sidney continued : Mr. Hawksley had written to him 

 as follows : — 



" 1. The dry weather sewage amounts to about 400,000 

 tons weight per diem, equal to the cargoes of a fleet of 400 

 ships, each of 1,000 tons burthen. 



" 2. Except to a small extent, it could not be applied in 

 the neighbourhood of London without pumping power, and 

 then on moderate computation would require an average 

 exertion of 3,000 horse-power kept at work night and day. 



'■ 3. The expenses of the construction and management of 

 such a pumping apparatus would be enormous, utterly dispro- 

 portionate to the result to be obtained. 



" 4. For although a vast quantity of very valuable fertilizing 

 matter enters the sewers, it suffers oxidation so rapidly when 

 agitated, in contact with air and water, that it almost ceases 

 to be on ammonia-producing agent, and on quitting the sewers 

 is all but worthless as an agricultural stimulant. Its value as 

 a mere irrigant being slightly greater than that of ordinary 

 water ; not sufficient to ooable it to bear carriage to a consi- 

 derable distance ' uphill and down dale.' Six or seven hun- 

 dred tons of water must be conveyed as the vehicle to place a 

 siut^le ton of solid manure on the land. 



" 5. When laid on land in large quantities, liquid sewage 

 stinks horribly j in moderate quantities, it requires so vast an 

 area for its diatributiou as to render its application im- 

 possible. 



" 6. Except under vary favourable and extremely excep- 

 tional circumstances (Edinburgh on a hill. S.S.), the liquid 

 sewage is of no worth, and the solid matter obtained by any 

 known deodorizing process has always remained a drug on 

 the bands of the heedless manufacturers, 



"7. The valuable properties of the native material are for 

 the 7nost part destroyed by chemical changes in the sewers ; 

 hence it becomes just possitile to transmute lead into silver, 

 ashes into coal, as to profitably employ the sewage of a great 

 citj' in lieu of farm manure. When you can at a profit re- 

 cover the smoke of a rifle into the original gunpowder, you may 

 reasonably expect to displace guano and homestead manure by 

 liquid sewage!" 



Mr. Sidney concluded by claiming some credit for 

 having accurately described and recorded " The Progress of 

 English Agriculture ;" and urging that he was entitled to not 

 less credit for opposing and exposing dangerous and costly 

 fallacies, than those who pointed the way to substantial im- 

 provements (cheers). 



Mr. Williams (Baydon, Hungerford) despaired of 

 sewage manure ever reaching him, on account of the 

 elevation and the distance of his farm from any town of 



considerable population; and he almost felt envious of 

 those farmers who resided in the neighbourhood of the 

 outfall of tlie Thames, notwithstanding the assertions of 

 some scientific men that sewage manure was valueless. As 

 a practical farmer himself, however, he hoped to see vast re- 

 sults accrue from its application. When he heard that the 

 Thames, especially in the summer season, was almost turned 

 into a solid instead of a fluid by the quantity of refuse that 

 was discharged into it, and that in the course of last year 

 a sailor who fell into the London Docks, being only im- 

 mersed three minutes, was found by a coroner's jury to have 

 been suffocated, not drowned, by the foul state of thewater, 

 he could not help thinking that there were elements in that 

 water, which, carried on to the land, must be beneficial] to 

 agriculture. He could not hide the fact from himself 

 that in Hampshire, where there were some of the best 

 water meadows in the kingdom, in his own and other coun- 

 ties in the west and south-west of England, they turned 

 out every drop of water that they could from the rivers 

 for the purpose of irrigating the lands in the neighbour- 

 hood, by which means they increased the produce three- 

 fold ; and seeing the quantity of soil that was contained 

 in town sewage, it was of the greatest importance that 

 the subject should be considered and discussed. He was 

 grateful, therefore, to Mr. Mechi for having to ably- 

 introduced it to the notice of the Club. In his own 

 and adjoining counties many persons would gladly increase 

 the extent of their water-meadows ; but the instant that 

 they set about it, the millers from below came upon them 

 and threatened them with an action, if tliey turned the 

 water over any other meadows than those where custom had 

 given them a right to do so. In his own parish there was 

 but one well, and that 300 feet deep ; yet at that elevation 

 he contrived to have a catch meadow. The manner in which 

 he contrived it was this : In very wet weather he brought 

 the runnings of a road, and what came oflf his neighbour's 

 farm, through his yard, the drainage of which it received, 

 and it then passed on to his meadow. The result was an 

 increased produce of 50 per cent, wherever he turned the 

 little stream ; for it was very small, being less in volume 

 than would pass through a hat. 



Mr. James Thomas : The observations of Mr. Wil- 

 liams seem rather to apply to the utility of water-meadows 

 than to the sewage of towns (Hesr, hear). 



Mr. Williams : What he had said would apply equally to 

 the water of the Thames. When the sewage of London had 

 been taken two or three miles down the side of the river, 

 the question would be what should next be done with it; 

 and he believed that the solid matter might be separated 

 from the fluid, and the latter diverted over the meadows in 

 the vicinity to the extent of many thousand acres, being 

 lifted to the highest lev 'l, and then watering them by gra- 

 vitation on the princijilj of a catch-meadow ; whilst the 

 solid portions might form the raw material of a vast amount 

 of artificial manure, for the benefit of farmers who could not 

 apply the sewage. He repeated, therefore, that he was 

 envious of the farmers who lived near the proposed outfall. 



Mr. Edmunds (of Kugby) wished to state to the Club the 

 results of the application of sewage to the land in his neigh- 

 bourhood. There was much that was deserving of considera- 

 tion in what both Mr. Mechi and Mr. Sydney had said, but 

 one fact was worth a whole bundle of theories. The question 

 was, what was to become of the sewage of towns? They 

 objected to poison the rivers with it. Could they not, there- 

 fore, make it effective and valuable for the purposes of 

 agriculture ? As yet, it was not so, and facts proved it. What 

 Mr. Sidney said was partly true : it was not effective, except 

 for grass crops ; but that it grew enormous crops of Italian 

 rye, and other grasses, Mr. Campbell's and Mr. Walker's 

 experiments sufficiently proved. On the other hand, it was 

 very questionabh whether it had done good to either roots or 

 cereals (Hear, hear). No doubt the laud was being deprived 

 of a vast quantity of manure by the general adoption of water- 

 closets. A material, which was the most valuable thing they 

 could apply — indeed, he questioned if it were not quite as 

 good as guano (Hear, hear) — was being thrown away ; but the 

 experience of Rugby was this. There they had a town of 

 eight thousand inhabitants. The quantity of water for sew- 

 age purposes alone amounts to 250,000 gallons ; and when 

 this enormous body of water was increased by the rainfall, 



