BY THE HON. W. F. TAYLOR, JI.L.C. 31 



presume it will be the same here, when the subject comes to be 

 practically considered in all its details, to get rid of the nuisance 

 (for nuisance it undoubtedly is' at as cheap a rate as possible. 

 No known process of converting it into manure, if we may 

 except the Ferozone one, pays the expense of doing so. although 

 it may diminish the cost of disposal to a greater or less degree, 

 according to the circumstances of the case. I know that there 

 is a I'ooted conviction in the minds of many that sewage farms 

 can be made to yield very profitable results, and that it is a 

 sinful waste of good manure to use the sewage in any other way. 

 Sewage farms, with very few exceptions, do not pay a profit on 

 the money invested, either in Europe or America, but probably 

 they might do so in sjme dry parts of Australia, where land is 

 cheap and farming products scarce — the irrigation alone would, 

 independently of any manurial ingredients in the liquid, be a 

 profitable undertaking. But it is only as a means of irtiiiat'nKj 

 that the (Question should be looked at, even in this country. 



Dr. C. Meymott Tidy says : — •• You will never make sewage 

 pay : I am convinced of that. The idea of making sewage pay 

 is a pure myth. Any profit that can be got out of a farm by 

 reason of the sewage is less than the expense of applying the 

 sewage to the farm, instead of letting it run away to waste." 



In conclusion, I caunot do better than quote the opinion of 

 the Royal Commission on ^Metropolitan Sewage Discharge given 

 in their report of 1884 : — 



•' (1) That the most likely mode to obtain a profit from the 

 utilisation of sewage is by irrigation, but that in the present 

 state of our knowledge of the subject there is no hope of any 

 to^^n doing so consistently with the due attainment of the more 

 important object, the purification of the sewage. In some very 

 favourable cases (as in Edinburgh) a profit may be made without 

 purification, and very frequently the purification may be eft'ected 

 without profit, but the two cannot apparently be combined." 



" (2) There is still less hope of profit by attempting to 

 extract manure from the sewage l)y depositing or precipitating 

 processes — the available manurial value of the sewage is at 

 present too small to admit of obtaining from it any product 

 which can be sold at anything like the cost of its production. 



