204 

NAL ORE 
| Fan. 12, 1871 

negative one,—in such cases the plan cannot afford much 
help to the memory. On the other hand, the tray or 
drawer containing an entire group can, with the utmost 
facility, be moved, to be re-arranged, to illustrate a lecture, 
or to occupy a different position in the series. 
In the present unsatisfactory condition of “ classifica- 
tion,” probably the only thoroughly scientific mode of con- 
veying information respecting an assemblage of organic 
forms, is that adopted by Professor Huxley, Professor 
Rolleston, and others, of describing completely a single 
included species ; but this method seems more suited for 
students than for a mixed company, such as have visited 
our institution since October 1861, during which period 
the admissions to the Liverpool Museum have exceeded 
four millions one hundred and sixty-two thousands. The 
mode of arrangement adopted within the groups will be 
described in a subsequent notice. 
HENRY H. HIGGINS 


UTILISATION OF SEWAGE 
A Digest of Facts relating to the Treatment and Utilisa- 
tion of Sewage. By W. H. Corfield, M.A., M.B. 
Oxon, Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at Uni- 
versity College, London. Prepared for the Committee 
of the British Association. (London: Macmillan & Co. 
1870.) 
R. CORFIELD, now the Professor of Hygiene and 
Public Health in University College, London, 
after having been a most distinguished student in the 
old University of Oxford, has put before the world in a 
well and large printed volume of something less than 
300 pages, a clear, readable, and reliable véswé of the 
“ Great Sewage Question.”” The labour which has been 
thus expended in lightening the labours of others can be 
adequately judged of by but few persons; but amongst 
those few may perhaps be reckoned individuals who, like 
the writer of this review, have for their sins or through 
their foolishness, been entrapped into serving on the 
drainage committees of Local Boards, and have felt them_ 
selves compelled, in the way of expiation, to purchase, if 
not to peruse, the hydra, or rather the medusa-brood of 
blue books which parliamentary commissions and privy 
council offices are so constantly giving off. Had Pro- 
fessor Corfield always given chapter and verse, page and 
paragraph, for his citations from the vast number of 
volumes to which we allude and he has referred, he would 
have put his claim to credit on the score of painstaking 
laboriousness more prominently before the eyes of his 
readers, though he might not thereby have made the 
reading of his work much the easier for them. As it 
stands, his book is eminently easy of comprehension, 
and we will, without further preface, say a few words as 
to the general outlines of the ground he professes to cover 
in it. 
The first 103 of the 282 pages of which the book con- 
sists, are taken up by an account, which is partly archzo- 
logical, and partly, we regret to say, as yet not so, of cer- 
tain systems for dealing with refuse which all alike labour 
under an amenability to an objection which our author, 
like ourselves, would appear to judge to be fatal to them. 
This objection he thus states (pp. 59, 60)—“ The question, 


in fact, to be solved would appear to be with all the 
methods which require hand and cart labour: how can the 
refuse matters be kept as long as possible without being 
positively dangerous to health ? instead of, as it should be, 
how can they be got rid of as fast as possible? This con- 
sideration at once stamps all methods of removal by 
scavenging, and must of itself bind them to a false prin- 
ciple, and lead to their condemnation.” They are rightly, 
we would suggest, called systems of Conservancy, 
professing, as they do, to seef something awhile, 
which it would be better to lose at once. This portion of 
the professor’s book is closed with a quotation from the 
“ First Report of the Rivers’ Pollution Commissioners” 
relating to one of those methods which at the present 
moment would appear to enjoy a considerable popularity ; 
and this quotation we will follow his example in repro- 
ducing, observing by the way that to the words “ First 
Report of the Rivers’ Pollution Commissioners,” there 
should have been added the words, “appointed in 1868, 
published in 1870, p. 50,” to save readers the trouble of 
referring to another Blue Book put out by another set of 
Commissioners appointed in 1865. The quotation is to the 
following effect :—‘‘ Add to those circumstances the enor- 
mous aggravation of all the difficulties of the plan, when not 
) 5c but 5000 households have to be provided with the ne- 
cessary appliances, and are induced to work them properly, 
and we can have no hesitation in pronouncing the dry 
earth system, if superior for institutions, villages, and 
camps, where personal or official regulations can be en- 
forced, entirely unfitted to the circumstances of large 
towns.” 
With his fifth chapter, p, 104, Dr. Corfield begins the 
history of the particular sanitary apparatus which is known 
on the continent as the “ Cadznet Anglais,” and with the 
various modifications, applications, and bearings, agricul- 
tural and hygienic, of the means for the water carriage of 
refuse, the rest of the book is filled up. Prof. Corfield is 
something of a physicist and of a chemist, and, thirdly, 
of a biologist ; and it is to be expected, and will be found, 
that he is not ignorant, firstly, that water-carriage is the 
cheapest of all modes of carriage ; secondly, that ammo- 
niacal gas is dissolved in, and most tenaciously held fast 
by when dissolved in, one-thousandth of its own volume 
of water ; and that, thirdly, this same chemical element, 
“the valuable constituent of sewage par excellence, can, 
when thus carried to land bearing crops, be taken up by 
them and used by them in their synthesis of albuminates 
for us animals. The obvious corollary of these rudi- 
mentary truths isthe acceptance of the principle of the 
disposal of sewage by irrigation, to the rejection, except 
under exceptional conditions, of all others; and this 
corollary our author thus states for us (p. 176), “All 
other systems than that of removal by water go upon the 
principle that it is not dangerous to leave excretal matters, 
either in a crude state (pail closets) or mixed with some 
absorbing or deodorising material (various other forms of 
closet) for a certain time in or about houses. The funda- 
mental principle being obviously a wrong one, it is not to 
be wondered at that such systems continuallyfail . . . 
The water carriage system, on the contrary, sends all the 
refuse matters at once to a distance in the cheapest 
manner possible by the mere action of gravity. . . . 
Figures are stubborn things to deal with, and the sanitary 
