286 The Public Health. [ April, 
less than one-ninth of the foreign matter contained in the purest 
water supplied to London, that of Chelsea. If all other sanitary 
conditions in Glasgow were on a par with the water-supply, one 
might naturally conclude that the mortality among the people 
living on the banks of the Clyde, receiving a daily average supply 
of about fifty gallons of water per head, would not mount up to 
28, 29, 30, and 31 per thousand as it frequently does;* indeed it 
is one of the rarest things imaginable for the Glasgow death-rate 
to fall below 28 per thousand. Unfortunately, however, the river 
on whose banks Glasgow is built is still a cloaca maxima, a great 
common-sewer, into which the refuse, filth, and abominations of the 
city are freely discharged, so as to make the harbour, durmg summer 
more especially, a seething cauldron from which putrid exhalations 
arise to poison the atmosphere, and slowly but surely to poison the 
people who are compelled to breathe it. Glasgow has shown a 
good example to London by its Loch Katrine water scheme, but it 
has yet to learn from the Metropolis how to improve its condition in 
respect of the great project of intercepting the sewage-matter and 
conveying it to such a distance as will prevent it exerting any 
detrimental influence on the health of the people, and possibly to 
such a part of the West of Scotland as will be directly benefited by 
its fertilizing power. 
However unfortunate the present state of things in Glasgow 
may be, still there is room for hope that it cannot exist much 
longer, and sanitary reformers even think that they already almost 
see the “beginning of the end.” In the course of last year the 
authorities embraced in the Town Council, the Police Board, and 
the Clyde Trustees, jointly agreed to remit the consideration of the 
whole question of the sewage to Mr. J. F. Bateman, the engineer- 
in-chief of the Loch Katrine Water-works; Mr. Bazalgette, the 
engineer of the Main Drainage and Thames Embankment schemes ; 
and Profesor Anderson, chemist to the Highland and Agricultural 
Society of Scotland. The gentlemen just named have been de- 
voting a good deal of attention to the subject; and in the month of 
February last the two eminent engineers spent some days in 
Glasgow in giving audience to persons who take an interest in this 
life-and-death question. That the subject has excited a vast 
amount of local interest (and deservedly so) may be inferred from 
the fact that during the past winter there has existed an organiza- 
tion called “'The Association for the Consideration of the Sewage 
Question.” It embraces in its membership Town Councillors, 
engineers, chemists, physicians, manufacturers, merchants, and 
others. Meetings have been held regularly every fortnight, at 
which papers, treating on almost every conceivable plan, have 
* Even in the mild weather of January last, the death-rate per thousand of the 
population was during five weeks, respectively, 27, 38, 32, 31, and 32. 
