li)ll] on Water Supply. Ill 



have been in contact with tlie lead of which distributing pipes are, 

 for the most part, constructed. It has been said that sand filters 

 remove the lead, but at present it is the rule to treat, or " doctor," 

 these very soft waters, as is done at Sheffield, where, to overcome this 

 difficulty, from lialf to (rarely) three grains of powdered chalk is added 

 to each gallon of water with excellent results. It has been found, 

 too, that loam or clay remove by merely carrying down organic or 

 inorganic impurities from water ; and it is certain that the precipita- 

 tion of lime which takes place in Clarke's process has some effect in 

 the same direction, although, from experiments made by T)r. Percy 

 Frankland in connection with the Cambridge Water Bill of 1910, it 

 does not seem to be a thoroughly effective method of purification. 

 In connection with that Bill, a suggestion was made that suspicious 

 waters — waters drawn from wells in the chalk in close proximity to 

 certain villages — could be made perfectly safe by the chlorinization 

 of water ; and it was stated that the ozone process which has been 

 adopted in relation to certain waters forming part of the supply to 

 Paris is also a useful and protective process in cases where waters are 

 liable to organic pollution, and in which the danger-signal of bacillus 

 coli are found. These instances are sufficient to show that water to 

 be potable must pass through the hands not only of the engineer 

 with his filter and storage, but also through the hands of the chemist 

 and bacteriologist ; in fact, water, unlike the poet, is made, not born. 



It is little more .than a year ago that Paris was suffering from the 

 drowning floods, which called, I think, for a Mansion House Relief 

 Fund, and just before Christmas the south of Lincolnshire was under 

 water, and the town of Newark stood out like an island in a sea 

 which stretched 25 miles or nearly, from Nottingham on the one side 

 to ColUngham on the other. At the same time, after the rains there 

 was a leak in the artificial bank of the Glen, which caused the flooding 

 of the whole of the Bourne Fen. The whole country was a sea, with 

 a sad archipelago of villages and farms. 



Here, then, there was enough of water flowing down from the 

 hills of Derbyshire to spoil the prospects of a harvest, to ruin the 

 potato crops of these fat fens, and in a few months from now we may 

 hear, as we often do, of some great Lancastrian town having been 

 put on the short commons of two hours a day for its water supply, 

 and of its having only a small number of days' supply in its reser- 

 voirs. These two aspects of the rainfall surely call for some national 

 action. As to the Fens, all that is suggested is the deepening of the 

 rivers which take the waters to the sea. Within the last two years 

 the Trent Navigation Company have taken 300,000 tons of material 

 out of the River Trent, which, of course, has had the effect of 

 modifying the floods to some small extent. But, of course, almost 

 the whole of the lands in these districts have been won from the sea 

 and are kept from the clutches of the sea, and land waters only by 

 means of embankments and drains. 



