ON THE TREATMENT AND UTILIZATION OF SEWAGE. 321 



City Council for the year 1868. 3. Copies of ordinances issued by the 

 Health Office and Mayor of the City of Boston in reference to house-offal, 

 ashes, &c. The construction of vaults and privies. Sanitary visitation. 

 4. Description of a plan for the Drainage of Washington proposed by ilr. 

 P. H. Donegan. 5. Letter addressed from the Mayor's office of the City 

 of Salem to Mr. Consul Lousada, stating that a system of sewerage is being 

 constructed in that city by which the whole of the town-refuse will be 

 carried into the two rivers between which it stands, instead of being 

 collected, as heretofore, in vaults or cesspits, and carted away at intervals 

 to serve as manure. 6. Municipal Register containing the ordinances, 

 regulations, &c. of the City of Salem for 1867. 

 20th May, 1869. From Wiirtemberg. — 1. Despatch from Mr. Gordon to the 

 Earl of Clarendon. 2. Strassen-Polizei-Vorschriften fiir die Stadt Stutt- 

 gart. (Police reg-ulations for the streets of Stattgard.) 3. Eeport on the 

 disposal of refuse in towns and dweUiugs, addressed to the Minister of the 

 Interior by the Central Board of Agriculture in Stuttgard. 



It appears from these documents that in most cases (both in town and 

 country places) the use of privies is very general, water-closets being rare 

 even in large towns, and that the usual method of dealing with human 

 excreta is to allow them to collect in pits (Abtrittsgruben, fosses), which are 

 sometimes drained, either naturally by the permeable character of the soU, or 

 artificially, so that most or all of the liquid portion of the contents of the pits 

 flows away or infiltrates the surrounding soil. Frequently privies are built 

 over rivers, with the object of getting rid of the excreta at once; and at 

 some places methods still more objectionable are adopted, many houses are 

 without either water-closets or privies, the common custom being to use 

 nightstools, which are emptied into pits near the house ; thus, for instance, in 

 Berlin, with a population under 600,000, there are said to be no less than 

 50,000 nightstools in daily use. 



Only in some few foreign towns is there any system of sewerage for the 

 removal of excreta by means of water ; this is the case in Hamburg, Paris, 

 Brussels, Hanover, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and some other 

 American towns to a greater or less extent. In some other towns modified 

 arrangements of the privy and pit system have been to some extent adopted. 

 These consist in substituting for the ordinary pit either a fixed or a portable re- 

 servoir for receiving the excreta. These reservoirs are sometimes constructed 

 with a drain by which the overflow or the liquid contents escape, and some- 

 times they are both water- and air-tight, the discharge of the liquid contents 

 into the sewers being prohibited. In some cases such reservoirs are con- 

 structed so as to receive only the excreta, and sometimes so as to separate the 

 solid and liquid excreta ; but they are also used in combination with water- 

 closets, and sometimes they receive rain-water from the house-roofs &c. as 

 well. 



The contents of the fixed reservoirs are removed periodically in several 

 different ways, and according to divers local regulations. Sometimes the 

 contents are simply dipped out, and sometimes they are removed either by 

 pumping into closed tank-carts with lift-pumps, or by means of a vacuum 

 previously produced in the tank-cart. In some few cases the time that may 

 elapse between the removal of the contents of these reservoirs is fixed by the 

 local authorities. The portable reservoirs are from time to time removed 

 and replaced by empty reservoirs, then carried outside the town, and their 

 contents used as manure in some way. Both the fixed and portable re- 



