SEWAGE DISPOSAL BY FISH CULTURE 



By M. C. Marsh, Gratwick Laboratory, Buffalo, N. Y. 



In "Les Miserables" Victor Hugo said that France 

 was pouring into the Atlantic Ocean a half billion of 

 francs every year. Bemoaning the waste of all the sew- 

 age of Paris, his imagination, delighting in paradox, 

 burst into this glorification of the burden of the sewers : 



"All this; a flowering field; it is green grass, it is 

 mint and thyme and sage, it is game, it is cattle, it is 

 the satisfied lowing of heavy kine at night, it is per- 

 fumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on your table, 

 it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it 

 is life." 



It is surprising that it did not occur to the novelist 

 in this flight of fancy that it is also the fishes swimming 

 in the brook, for now reality has gone even further and 

 made "it" the fish in the market and on the table. Fish 

 culture has been linked with sewage disposal. Agricul- 

 ture had already effected, in broad irrigation, a partial 

 saving of the waste of the great potential values in sew- 

 age. Now comes fish culture with the hope of making 

 the product pay all the costs of the transformation. 



Sewage disposal, always one of the great current prob- 

 lems, has slowly progressed and various means have 

 been more or less perfected for converting the offense 

 and possible danger of city sewage into a harmless and 

 unobjectionable effluent. Sewage irrigation projects, by 

 which the sewage is poured over a large acreage which 

 is then cropped, are comparatively rare and almost never 

 pay the cost of operation. Sanitary conversion of 

 sewage into something unobjectionable, but not valuable 

 is successfully but not universally practiced and the pro- 

 cesses are cumbersome and expensive. Even now most 

 cities discharge their sewage unaltered into lakes, rivers 

 or the sea and let it go at that. 



The Germans, ever efficient in ways and means, have 

 taken the next step. They have sought to change the 



