1866. | Sewage and Sewerage. 185 
renders their example inapplicable to us. It is their habit* to 
dilute their manure very largely, even though not so largely as to 
the extent of the forty gallons of water per head of London extra- 
vagance, before they apply it to the land. 
The poudrette of the Patent Eureka Company, on the other hand, 
is sown broadcast over the land in a dry form,{ a plan which we 
think contrasts to disadvantage with these Oriental methods, and 
which must ultimately impair somewhat the success which, we learn, 
has been considerable in the town of Hyde. Even the Chinese, as 
we gather from Mr. White’s evidence,t put on record in the Blue 
Book last quoted, “ have the idea that manure, whether the produc- 
tion of bipeds or quadrupeds, if applied to land in a dry state, burns 
the plant.” Of the carriage of the material whence this poudrette 
is manufactured, from the places where it is produced to that where 
it is operated upon by the Company, nothing need be said beyond 
what we have already hinted at, as to the encumbrance and annoy- 
ance which a crowd of “ collecting carts ” would create in our streets. 
Of the process of manufacturing it, we read nothing unfavourable 
in the evidence given (/. c.) by the chairman of the Company. 
Of the different plans for the removal of refuse by the agency 
and with the assistance of one of the three “elements” of the 
ancients—earth, to wit, water, and fire, the last is, from a purely 
chemical point of view, the best, as being the most thoroughgoing. 
It is organic compounds, containing either nitrogen, or sulphur, or 
phosphorus, or all three of these substances, which form the most 
deleterious products of sewage; and the state of perfect oxida- 
tion into which burning brings them, even if it does not confer any 
infinitesimal disinfecting power upon their disjecta membra, renders 
them wholly innocuous as miasms. This method of destroying 
refuse has again and again been recommended and employed in 
epidemics, with the best results; and it has been recently recom- 
mended by the Cattle Plague Commissioners. But in happier and 
ordinary times it will be, we hope, inapplicable in practice, though 
so perfect in theory—such worship of Moloch would be intolerable 
in a country where furnaces have been occasionally, and steamboats 
not rarely, compelled to consume their own smoke. We leave the 
subject, therefore, with the remarks that the partisans of the “ Cine- 
real” theory of manures would do well to show their faith by estab- 
lishing such works for dealing with refuse as the Jews had in the 
Valley of Hinnom. When they have done this, then, but not till 
then, will Mr. Lawes be held to have had the worst of the argument, 
and the German substitution of “nitrogenous” and “ non-nitroge- 
nous manures,” for “organic” and “inorganic manures,” be believed 
* Liebig’s‘ Natural Laws of Husbandry,’ p.393. Dr. Brady, ‘Second Report,’ p.71. 
+ Dr. Brady’s Select Committee, ‘Second Report,’ p. 21 (2,600). 
t Ibid., p. 6 (2,335). ; 
0) 
