ON THE SOCIAL BENEFITS OF PARAFFINE. 119 



Kingdom but all the assertions that have been made relative 

 to injury to human health are quite contrary to truth. 



The fact is that the manufacture of mineral oils from cannel 

 and shale is an unusually healthful occupation. The men cer- 

 tainly have dirty faces, but are curiously exempt from those 

 diseases which are most fatal among the poor. I allude to 

 typhus fever, and all that terrible catalogue of ills usually 

 classed under the head of zymotic diseases. This has been 

 strikingly illustrated in the Flintshire district. The very 

 sudden development of the oil trade in the neighborhood of 

 Leeswood caused that little village and the scattered cottages 

 around to be crowded to an extent that created the utmost 

 alarm among all who are familiar with the results of such over- 

 crowding in poor, ill-drained, and ill-ventilated cottages. 

 Rooms were commonly filled with lodgers who economized the 

 apartments on the Box and Cox principle, the night workers 

 sleeping during the day, and the day workers during the night, 

 in the same beds. The extent to which this overcrowding was 

 carried in many instances is hardly credible. 



Mr. R. Platt, who is surgeon to most of the collieries and oil- 

 works of this district, reports that Leeswood has enjoyed a 

 singular immunity from typhus and fever that during a period 

 when it was prevalent as a serious epidemic among the agricult- 

 ural population living on the slopes of the surrounding moun- 

 tains, no single case occurred among the oil-making population 

 of Leeswood, though its position and overcrowding seemed so 

 directly to court its visitation. If space permitted, I might 

 give further illustrations in reference to allied diseases. 



There is no difficulty in accounting for this. Carbolic acid, 

 one of the most powerful of our disinfectants, is abundantly 

 produced in the oil-works, and this is carried by the clothes of 

 the men, and with the fumes of the oil into the dwellings of 

 the workmen and through all the atmosphere of the neighbor- 

 hood, and has thereby counteracted some of the most deadly 

 agencies of organic poisons. Besides this, the paraffine oil 

 itself is a good disinfectant. 



Even the mischief done to the trout is more than counter- 

 balanced by the destruction of those mysterious fungoid 

 growths which result from the admixture of sewage matter with 

 the water of oar rivers, and are so destructive to human health 

 and life. The carbolic acid and paraffne oil, in destroying 

 these as well as the trout, are really acting as great purifiers of 

 the river, so that, after all, the only interest that has suffered is 



