AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 235 



months, under thirty feet pressure. I have written to learn with what 

 success, and will report to the Club in due time. 



Robert Harvey has a dairy farm near Glasgow, of 400 acres, and keeps 

 a thousand cows, and has five miles of under-ground pipes, through which 

 he forces the fertilizing liquid from his cow stables, and sells to the neigh- 

 boring farmers 2,000 tons of solid manure, annually, for a dollar and a 

 half per ton. 



On this farm the liquid is applied with great advantage to all crops. It 

 produces fine oats, wheat, turnips, mangel wurzcl, cabbages, &c., but has 

 the most wonderful eifect on Italian rye grass, which is first cut when four 

 feet high ; the second, four feet three inches ; and the third, eighteen 

 inches. 



The fluid is applied immediately after cutting, and if the cattle are 

 turned on seven days afterward, they eat most greedily, and invariably 

 select the portions of the field that has received the largest dose. 



The Metropolitan Sewage company, at Fulham, England, have a station 

 on the west bank of the Kensington canal, at Stanley bridge, where they 

 have erected a steam engine to pump the sewage water of the town over 

 the top of a stand pipe seventy-five feet high. This altitude gives a suffi- 

 cient pressure for the whole contiguous district, and the fertilizing fluid is 

 conveyed from the stand pipe, and distributed, by about fifteen miles of 

 mains and services, varying from fourteen inches diameter at the works, 

 down to two inches diameter in the fields and gardens where it is used. 

 The consumers have plugs or hydrants fixed at convenient distances in their 

 lands, and with their own servants, and hose and jet pipe, apply it when 

 they please ; paying to the company the sum of seventeen and a half dol- 

 lars per acre per annum. And they found the fertilizing power of 

 extremely diluted city sewage extraordinary, absolutely augmenting the 

 ordinary large crops more than half. The sea meadows near Edinburgh, 

 worthless twenty years ago, are enriched by sewage water, by gravitation, 

 and open gutters, at an expense of twelve dollars per acre, and are now worth 

 two thousand six hundred dollars per acre. Irrespective, therefore, of the ex- 

 traordinary pecuniary value of city sewage, the expeditious removal of all 

 organic fertilizing excreta from our city is so necessary to health, that 

 every facility should be given by the Legislature to the corporation, for the 

 most efficient arrangements for stations, reservoirs, mains and service pipes, 

 necessary to distribute sewage waters in the rural districts. I would re- 

 spectfully recommend that the corporation of New York, ofi'er to pay the 

 sum expended last year for cleansing the city, for the next ten years, to 

 any company, who will engage to wash every street, and flush every drain, 

 between the hours of one and four o'clock, after sundown, without permit- 

 ting any portion of the same to enter either the North or East river, from 

 the first of March to the first of December. This plan would save all the 

 excrementitious matter of our population, and return it to the soil, enabling 

 it to maintain in fertility as many acres as there are inhabitants, with the 



