1866. ] Sewage and Sewerage. 183 
more refined perfumes, the empyreumatic and therefore more or 
less antiseptic properties of which may account for their all but 
universal employment in such countries. It 1s, in most cases, a 
mere mockery to speak of the “hermetical closure” and sealing up 
of a cesspool ; for its liquid contents penetrate almost inevitably into 
the neighbouring wells, spreading and multiplying cholera and 
typhoid fever, whensoever these plagues arise among us, in a 
manner the most unmistakeable. And the air we breathe is tainted 
by the cesspool even more surely than the water we drink. Such 
structures are, in fact, gasogenes of the very foulest kind; and even 
when they are not placed directly beneath a house, as of old, the 
draught exercised by the fires in the houses they are connected with, 
and the specific lightness of the gases themselves, make their access 
to every room a certainty, in the default of an all but impossible 
system of trapping and ventilation. The condition of Chichester, 
as given in a recent Privy Council Office Report, and as contrasted 
with the ‘condition of Salisbury, is, perhaps, a crucial instance of 
the effects of the cesspool system of non-removal of sewage. Mr. 
Menzies, Professor Way, Mr. Henry Austin, Mr. Rawlinson, and 
the Barrack Improvement Commissioners, all alike denounce the 
system unsparingly in the different books placed at the head of this 
article ; and a certain Sanitary Commission, called the Metropolitan 
Commission of Sewers, abolished in the year 1847-1848 no less than 
thirty thousand of these centres for pollution,* in what is now the 
healthiest capital in Europe. But though science and practice are 
both alike so opposed to its being, the cesspool has yet its proper 
lace and right to existence. In the case of houses in the country, 
with land about them in large quantity—measured, that is, by the 
pole and perch, and not by the square yard or foot, not built upon, 
nor to be built upon—a cesspool constructed so as to be as nearly 
watertight as possible, fitted with ventilating tubes and trapped, may 
be entirely innocuous, and by the addition of purifying apparatus 
made highly profitable. Indeed, even in a town, a person who pos- 
sesses a large garden may, by placing his cesspool at the most dise 
tant part of such garden, contrive that it be, if not wholly uninjurious 
to his neighbours, at all events, nearly so to himself. 
Of the various plans for removal of sewage, the simplest is that 
which merely takes it away without the addition to it of any water 
or the admixture with it of any disinfectant or deodorant substance. 
Tt has or might have its place and application in regions where 
from extreme drought or extreme cold, water is not available for the 
same purpose, and where labour is cheap. In a populous town and 
a civilized country the watertight carts which would be neces- 
sary for carrying out such a system would be so numerous as to 
block upf the streets, and whilst thus rivalling all other modifications 
* Bazalgette, I. c. p. 
6. : 
+ Rawlinson ; ‘ Evidence, Lord Robert Montagu’s Committee,’ p. 184 (4,177). 
VOL. III, oO 
