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than any other, for this reason, that however much land 

 you might take for the purpose of spreading liquid 

 manure on the surface to produce crops, in the course of 

 time the land would become so saturated that it was 

 necessary to obtain an additional quantity, which was very 

 expensive. He had not seen the works at Aylesbury, but 

 had read about them, and his son, who had property in 

 Berwickshire, told him that he had visited them, and had 

 tried some of the manure on a small home farm which he 

 had, and found most excellent results from it. He under- 

 stood the rev. gentleman who 'spoke first suggested that 

 the laws ought to be of a much more penal character, and 

 he was quite of that opinion himself. He thought it was a 

 criminal act on the part of people to poison those rivers 

 which were intended by Providence for a totally different 

 purpose. In Scotland they had Public Health Acts, some 

 of which contained provisions especially applicable to 

 boroughs and populous places a populous place being 

 defined as a district occupied by a population of 1200. 

 Under these Acts it was a criminal offence to put any 

 noxious matter into a stream running through such a 

 district, and the offender could be not only fined but im- 

 prisoned. That law ought to be adopted for the whole of 

 the kingdom, not only in boroughs and populous places, 

 but everywhere. He lived in the district of a river which 

 traversed three or four counties, and persons on the banks 

 were more or less deprived of the use of it. They could 

 not avail themselves of it for any domestic purpose. This 

 subject, although connected with fish, was also connected 

 with the health and happiness of the whole population. 

 The great difficulty was, who were the persons to enforce 

 the law ? He was a riparian proprietor, and hitherto it had 

 been left to individual proprietors to endeavour to stop the 



