56 



WATEE SUPPLY IN RELATION TO DISEASE. 



By His Lordship the Bishop of Tasmania. 



[Bead May Ufh, 1878.] 



When we consider that water covers some four-fifths of the 

 surface of the earth, and that the health of men depends 

 upon its free and lavish use ; when we consider again that, 

 though the vast reservoirs of water are, for a wise purpose, 

 salt and useless for drinking purposes, Nature has taken upon 

 herself the work of a great distiller, we may well deplore 

 the folly and apathy of communities of men who allow what 

 was offered to them for their benefit to return thanklessly 

 in waste to the ocean from whence it came. Nature has 

 made the clouds her carriers of the purest distilled water, 

 which has left all its salts behind, and then deposits her 

 precious burden in the form of snow, or sleet, or rain, upon 

 the tops of the mountain ranges and table-lands. Filtering 

 through the porous strata of the hills, it reaches the im- 

 pervious clays, and forcing its way horizontally it runs down 

 the mountain sides. There comes man's opportunity for 

 arresting its course as it flows past, and saying to it what 

 Jacob said unto the angel in his mysterious conflict, " I will 

 not let thee go, except thou bless me." It is folly — it is 

 worse than folly, unless it be gross ignorance of sanitary laws, 

 not to dam the streams at the mouth of the glens, and to 

 construct reservoirs on such a scale for its accommodation 

 that the poorest man and his family — and so much the rather, 

 because it is poor and more likely to be ignorant — shall have 

 enough and to spare of this life-giving element. Deprive him 

 of it and what then ? Just that which has been happening 

 this summer among ourselves as a consequence ? Drinking 

 from stagnant wells, befouled by vegetable decomposition, 

 animal refuse, and disgusting drains and miasmatic cesspools, 

 and other forms of fever disease have been hovering over 

 every household ; scarlet fever and diphtheria break out, 

 houses are rendered unwholesome, and the drunkard's thirst 

 sets in. 



It is a scandal to our civilization that Great Britain and her 

 colonists should take no sufficient measures for purifying the 

 sources of her domestic water supply. The alarm, indeed, 

 created by the periodic visitation of the Almighty's scourge — 

 the Asiatic cholera — and our more domestic typhoid diseases, 

 led to the appointment of a Eoyal Commission of which Sir 

 W. Denison was Chairman. I quote from their 6th Eeport the 

 statement of their unanimous conviction, pages 140-1 : — - 



" But where the organic matter comes from drainage it is a 

 most formidable ingredient in water, and is the one of all others 



