388 APPENDIX. [No. XXXVI.A. 



obtained the poison by drinking the sewage or by eating plants which had 

 previously absorbed the sewage. As long as good milk is a necessity to a 

 town, let us have no putrid sewage on a dairy farm. Let not the cows 

 drink sewage or eat putrid sewage grass. 



A farm with sewage on it, and a sewage farm, must be held to be 

 pestilential, death-producing swamps, until the sewage is disinfected. 

 Nature should be followed, and manurial matters in the putrid state 

 should be changed to mineral matters before they are absorbed by the 

 plants which feed upon them. Theoretically earth disinfects the sewage. 

 In practice, as now managed, part of the sewage never gets into the earth 

 to be disinfected, as the whole is spread over the waterlogged ground, 

 where it exhales its pestilential gases. Cows, whilst it is so spread over 

 the field, drink some ; blades of grass attach to themselves solid particles, 

 and plants take up other particles in their juices. Notwithstanding this 

 absurd deviation from the ways of nature, sewage farmers, engineers* 

 speculators, and others living by the promotion of sewage farms, recom- 

 mend sewage farms, as now conducted, as the source of all sanitary good- 

 All men know that if we do not return to the ground that which we take 

 from the ground the earth will not restore to us its usual crops. Sewage- 

 farm speculators assume that they alone know this great fact, and are 

 always demonstrating it to draw off attention from the infraction of the 

 laws of Nature. If they return sewage to the land, they care not in what 

 state they apply it, and either do not know, or pretend not to know, the 

 danger they incur. The gardener who makes up his hotbed sweetens his 

 manure by fermentation, when ammonia is produced. The rootlets of his 

 cucumbers and melons run in the manurial mass, and sweet and wholesome 

 produce is obtained. 



The gardener also uses liquid manure with care and caution in certain 

 stages of the growth of a plant. He particularly abstains from giving the 

 ripening strawberry such manure, as he knows that his fruit would be 

 corrupted. The sewage irrigators, regardless of consequences, use putrid 

 manure at such a period that the plants are dangerous to animals. They 

 do not know, or they care not for the fact, that vegetable dyes, as madder, 

 will permeate an animal and colour its bones, which demonstrates to all 

 physiologists how animals are affected by the food they eat. Much more 

 may be said upon the effect of sewage vegetation on cows and sheep used 

 afterwards for human food, which must be considered at a convenient 

 season. Sewage promoters say that they can conduct their farms with 

 safety to the community. Take them at their word, and if any complaints 

 fairly arise from mismanagement, let the delinquent be fined 100 a day 

 for every day a sewage farm is mismanaged. Sewage farmers who sell 

 sewage directly put into the milk, or sewage transmitted through the cow 

 to the milk, or transmitted through vegetables imbued with sewage to the 

 cow, and from the cow by the milk to man, would be rather astonished if 

 they were found legally liable for their acts as railroad companies are 

 liable for preventable accidents. A verdict of 10,000 against a town 

 council for the death of a father of a family, in consequence of poisoned 

 milk sent from a dairy farm with sewage upon it, or a badly-managed 

 sewage-ground, will do more than any argument to rectify it. Town 

 councillors, as a whole, have neither intellect to comprehend, intelligence 

 to perceive, nor public spirit to undertake an expense necessary to deal 



