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One sort of subterranean filth is especially dangerous. To dispose harmlessly of the 

 excreta of men and animals, is a problem which baffles civilization. On farms and in 

 villages the vault or cess-pool, if water-tight, becomes a hideous, festering mass of liquid 

 rottenness ; if, as is common, it is not water-tight, its contents are only a little drier, 

 because the liquid filth permeates the sub-soil and oozes away. Oozes away, whither 1 

 Profitable inquiry ! 



For obvious reasons most towns and villages lie in valleys and are built upon allu- 

 vium — gravel, sand, or sandy loam — a sort of soil that is very permeable to all sorts of 

 fluid, clean or unclean. The wells, we must remember, are dug in this same sub-soil, and 

 are dug deeper than the vaults, sometimes fifteen and rarely more than fifty feet distant 

 from the vault or cess-pool. The uniform distribution of filth through the sub-soil of 

 towns, situated according to our hypothesis, would be only a question of time, but, since 

 the soil-moisture is constantly changing its level with the varying rainfall and the varying 

 level of water in the streams near by, the distribution of organic matter through the 

 deeper strata of the earth takes place with great rapidity, and becomes a question of very 

 brief time. 



It is a curious fact that only savages dispose of their dead in a way to make them 

 harmless to the living. In lower grades of culture, men have been wont to make harm- 

 less disinfected mummies of their dead, or have left them on elevated platforms where 

 the dangerous products of decomposition are diluted and destroyed in the great atmos- 

 pheric ocean, or have exposed them to the carrion-eating birds of the air, or have con- 

 sumed them with purifying fire. Under our grade of civilization, the dead are rotted 

 underground, near the church, and the church is never far from the crowded haunts of 

 living men. 



The microscopist, the sanitarian, the physiologist, the practical physician and the 

 surgeon, each on his own line of investigation, has come to the same conclusion as regards 

 these subterranean stores of filth. They are not only poisons themselves, causing general 

 malaise and gravely lowering the vital powers, but they constitute a nidus, wherein low 

 organisms breed — organisms which are associated with the most deadly diseases, typhus 

 fever, typhoid fever, diptheria, etc., etc. 



It was from such deposits of organic matter, that the mediaeval plagues took their 

 origin. It is in such depots of accumulated rottenness, that the Asiatic cholera grows 

 strong and malignant, and carries death to all continents. It was this sort of filth, hidden 

 for long years under Sandringham Palace, that poisoned the heir of England, and well- 

 nigh cost him his life. 



And what can we do with it ? We dare not dig into it, if there were men and 

 money enough in the world. We cannot inject chemicals into the soil to decompose it, 

 for who will tell us how deeply, or how far, or in what directions filth will extend itself 

 from a given focus of distribution 1 But the blessed trees, we may be sure, will traverse 

 all strata of the earth in search of organic matter ; their roots find it and feed upon it ; 

 they alter it, chemically, as essentially as if it were burned ; and they elevate it into the 

 air in forms of beauty and of use. 



I have now completed such brief review of the influence of the forest on man's 

 physical health, as the occasion allows. But I trust you will suffer me to use an abused 

 term and say that the forest has an influence upon the aesthetic sense, which a liberal 

 sanitarian and wise physican cannot afford to ignore. Life without beauty is a dead and 

 unwholesome thing, truly, though we have heard the doctrine preached from unworthy 

 lips of late, and whatsoever ministers to the aesthetic sense, ministers to complete health. 

 We may not scout at smaller vegetables while we praise the trees, for all things that grow 

 are of use. Even thistles were made for asses to chew, and sunflowers for the delectation 

 of more refined donkeys. But trees, I think, are fit to minister to a manly man's thirst 

 for beauty. A treeless land is not commonly a land of health for body or soul, and he 

 who enters into the companionship of trees, knows more than most men know of aesthetics. 



Beauty and goodness we know are closely akin. As the sturdiest crops and the most 

 exquisite wild-flowers grow near the woods, so the greatest and the rarest of mankind 

 and sweet womankind have been educated, nurtured, developed and inspired by the woods. 

 A very great part of our wisdom had its strong roots in the academic groves of Greece. 



