196 



NATURE 



{Dec. 30. 1886 



out that whatever the estimated value of sewage may be 

 — %s. 4(1 per annum per head of the inhabitants of water- 

 closet towns, or i;;;'. per ton with a dilution of 61 tons — 

 it is actually reduced to the sewage farmer by attendant 

 drawbacks to the present mode of application to much 

 less than jrf. per ton. The sewage must be applied to 

 the land whether it is wanted or not, and may, under 

 such circumstances, be the cause of mischief to crops 

 rather than of benefit. It has been assumed that by 

 surface irrigation one acre is capable of purifying the 

 sewage of 100 persons; but what farmer, Mr. Bailey- 

 Denton very pertinently remarks, would give even a 

 farthing per ton for the obligation to apply in a year 6100 

 tons of liquid to an acre — equivalent to a superincumbent 

 depth of 5 feet, or 2i times the average rainfall — though 

 he would gladly give a larger price per ton if he could 

 have what he wanted, just at such times as he wanted it ? 

 " All experiences tend to prove that the obligation to 

 ' get rid ' of a large quantity of sewage under all circum- 

 stances and conditions, at night as well as day, on 

 Sundays as well as week-days, on cropped lands as well 

 as fallows, and at all stages of growth, from seed-time to 

 harvest, puts it beyond the reach of man to gain any real 

 profit from it." jMany of the ordinary farm crops, as 

 cereals, pulses, potatoes, and turnips, are injured by the 

 application of sewage. Rye-grass, cabbages, mangolds, 

 carrots, parsnips, and perhaps onions, are the plants that 

 thrive best under sewage (it is said to be impossible to 

 overdose rye-grass with sewage) ; but these are crops 

 that may very readily be produced in larger quantities 

 than there are markets for. 



The great drawback, alluded to above, can be overcome 

 by every sewage farm having specially prepared filtration 

 areas, capable of purifying the whole sewage, when not 

 wanted on the general surface of the farm, and leaving it 

 within the power of the occupier to draw such quantities, 

 at such times as he requires them, as dressings for his 

 crops. Under such arrangements sewage farming may 

 be expected — as it has been found by Mr. Bailey-Denton 

 at Malvern and elsewhere — to be remunerative to the 

 farmer and satisfactory to the town authorities. The 

 cost of laying out tlie land for intermittent filtration is 

 high — from 30/. to 150/. per acre in difficult cases, accord- 

 ing to Mr. Bailey-Denton's estimate — but not sufficiently 

 high in any way to counteract the immense advantages 

 which the possession of such filtration areas confers. 



A MEDICAL INDEX-CATALOGUE 

 Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's 

 Office, U.S. Army. Vol. VII. Insignar^s-Leghorn, pp. 

 [100] and 959. (Washington : Government Printing 

 Offices, 1886.) 



rHE masterly way in which Mr. J. S. Billings is 

 conducting this Index-Catalogue, and publishing 

 punctually year by year these large volumes of about a 

 thousand closely-packed pages, is a matter worth the atten- 

 tion not only of all interested in medicine and surgery, 

 but also of all interested in modern libraries and modern 

 journalistic literature. For the Library of the Office of 

 General Robert Murray, Surgeon- General of the U.S. 

 Army, though only founded in 1S30, is now one of the 

 largest collections of medical literature in the world. 



larger possibly than that of the British Museum, of the 

 Bibliothcque Nationale of Paris, or the collections of 

 Berlin or Vienna, and it contains some manuscripts, 

 notably a letter of Edward Jenner's, which the English 

 librarians would be glad to have. Its catalogue is cer- 

 tainly much more complete, as far as it has been pub- 

 lished, in spite of the method of execution having been 

 much more ditficult. For these seven volumes that have 

 been hitherto published contain more than 254,000 refer- 

 ences to articles or essays in journals and periodicals of 

 all kinds and in all languages, arranged under the sub- 

 jects to which they refer. The French and German 

 pleasure in framing appended bibliographies on the 

 subjects of some monographs which they publish has 

 never given them courage enough to face such a Her- 

 culean task. The number of periodicals which either 

 have been or are being taken in by the Library has risen 

 since last year, when vol. vi. was published, from 3005 to 

 3270, and extends through a wide geographical range, 

 from the Norsk Magazin of Christiania, to the Ktinle 

 I-lct::u (the Modern Medical News) of Yedo ; and in wide 

 range of interest from the Revue des deux Mondes, to the 

 Dental Luminary of Macon, Ga., U.S. The learned com- 

 pilers of the Index-Catalogue are good enough always to 

 translate the Japanese titles when they print them in 

 English letters ; indeed they sometimes go further, 

 and, avoiding the difficulty of even transliterating them, 

 give us merely the title in English, with a warning 

 note that the original title is Japanese. Magyar is also 

 as a rule, though not by any means always, translated ; 

 Polish sometimes, Russian only occasionally. The whole 

 method of the book is so perfectly orderly and symmetri- 

 cal, that it makes us wonder whether this want of rule 

 in translation is one of the trifling points in which the 

 individualism of Mr. Billings' assistants has crept in ; for 

 we cannot see that the translated titles are in any way 

 more difficult than the untranslated. 



Under the subject-headings come the great masses of 

 quotation of the titles of articles in periodical literature 

 which make the Catalogue so unique. If we turn to the 

 name of an author who writes both books and papers in 

 journals, &c., we shall not find entered under it anything 

 but his separately published works ; though, probably, 

 all of those down to his smallest reprint from some So- 

 ciety's Transactions, and with these, in smaller type, a 

 reference to other books to which he has contributed or 

 which he has translated ; and, if he is dead, a reference, 

 probably, to some biography of him, and some portrait ; 

 but, beyond this, none of his contributions to journals or 

 Transactions. Nevertheless, under the subject-title of 

 any such contribution, whether it be Jaundice, Jealousy, 

 or Jequirity, will be found a reference to his article if it 

 was signed, and his name, in bold type, clearly standing 

 out among the mass of contributors to that branch of 

 knowledge. It would have been possible, of course, to 

 print such references twice over — once under the heading 

 of the author, and again under the subject-title ; but we 

 can hardly wonder that -that has not been done, as it 

 would have added some five or six thousand pages to a 

 series of volumes already in danger of being over- 

 weighted, and, also, it would have supplied information 

 which is of more importance to the biographer than to 

 medical science. 



