148 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



citizens use them who need them most and which class is most averse to their use, 

 are of the first importance. Bodily cleanliness is the first step toward household 

 neatness, for no clean family will live in a filthy house. It is this feeling, com- 

 bined with the natural alarm produced by the frightful pictures and objects drawn 

 by sanitary engineers and microscopists, that has led the people of great cities to 

 grasp at any straw that promised reUef or escape from the dangers of the specter 

 unsanitanes. It has driven them from the common sense measures that would 

 have in most cases answered every purpose, to the transfer of the- personal control 

 of their own households to municipal officers whose blundering and jobbery has 

 inflicted great burdens of taxation as well as many physical evils upon them. 



ihe cleansing of dwellings does not depend alone upon the use of water. 

 Dry dirt is preferable to moist and moldy cleanliness. Scrubbing is good sani- 

 tation only when followed by thorough drying and ventilation. Dry dirt, even on 

 a kitchen floor, is far more tolerable, hygienically than slops and rotten beams 

 under the floor. Moist and mildewed papers, held to sodden walls by putrid 

 paste, will originate diseases which could have no existence in a dry atmos- 

 phere. These evils are not remedied by sewer pipes. On the contrary they are 

 often intensified by the addition of sewer gases escaping from defective joints. 

 The remedy is to properly carry off from the roofs the rain which otherwise 

 permeates the walls, and to put down kitchen floors that are impermeable to water. 

 These precautions, with proper ventilation, will go far to render our dwellings 

 dry and healthful. 



To properly cleanse streets and alleys is to remove the filth, not by washing 

 it partially away occasionally with a hose and leaving the remainder to ferment 

 and fester in the sun in the nooks and corners, the interstices between the flags of 

 the gutters, and in the mud of the macadam, but by scraping and sweeping it up 

 and carting it away, by leaving the streets as dry as may be except from the 

 most superficial sprinkHng, by removing all slops and garbage from the alleys 

 and using lime and copperas as disinfectants at all offensive localities. 



A model street is one composed of a smooth, not slippery, hard material, im- 

 permeable to moisture; with its sewers opening into towers high enough to dis- 

 charge the foul gases above the heads of the people and its dust and accumula- 

 tions swept or washed away at night. 



Much of the pestilence which has decimated Memphis twice within the past 

 few years was due to the condition of her streets, which had been covered with wood- 

 en pavements. "These had become much decayed, and readily absorbed much of 

 of the liquid filth that flowed over the rotten gutters, and in due course became 

 so permeated with it that the periodical flushings of rain storms utterly failed to 

 cleanse them and they were the constant source of poisonous emanations . " 



The disposition of the sewage of a town is the most troublesome question 

 of all, and one that is far from being settled, though milhons of dollars have been 

 expended in the large cities of the world, in attempts to solve it. Manifestly the 

 most complete and thorough solution of the matter is to burn the solid portion; 



