25 
PETER THE GREAT. 
By H. L. JOSELAND, M.A. 4th March, 1902. 
The Editor much regrets being unable to obtain a report 
of Mr. Joseland’s paper. 

THE BACTERIAL TREATMENT OF SEWAGE. 
(With Lantern Iniusrrations.) 
By Mr. RAYMOND ROSS, F.J.C. 11th March, 1902. 
The main object of the Lecturer was to explain and illustrate 
the scheme of Sewage disposal as carried out in Burnley, and to 
indicate some of the principal methods adopted elsewhere. 
The earliest authenticated reference to Sewage disposal is 
found in the history of Moses, who ordered all unclean matter to 
be carried outside the camp. 
In the old times the land was usually able to deal with the 
amount of Sewage produced, but in the present day, with large 
cities and congested centres, the volume of Sewage cannot be 
thus satisfactorily dealt with. The rivers, wells, and drinking 
supplies in the neighbourhood would all become polluted, and a 
source of danger to the population, for many microbes, such as 
those of typhoid fever and of cholera, are contained in the excreta 
of patients suffering from those diseases, and would cause an 
epidemic, if they found their way into the drinking supplies of 
the neighbourhood. The waste materials of the body contain 
masses of minute organisms, and as some of these were pathogenic, 
or disease producing microbes, the necessity for their treatment in 
some such manner as to render them innocuous was very evident. 
