410 Rev. A. Irving—Water Supply from Bagshot Sands. 
oxygen held in solution in rain-water, of the noxious carbonaceous 
matter with which these sands abound wherever they are buried to 
to any great depth. All over the district the fact that good water 
cannot be got if a well penetrates the ‘running blue sand,’ as they 
call it, is familiar to every well-digger. In places in this district 
where denudation has removed all but a few feet of the upper bright 
ferruginous sands, shallow wells abound, and the water from them 
is pronounced wholesome as a rule. On the other hand, numerous 
cases have come to my knowledge, where wells have been sunk into 
the deeper sands, and these produce a water which, in its smell, its 
deposit of ochreous and organic matter on standing, and its general 
unwholesomeness as testified by the experience of the inhabitants, 
resembles water from a morass. 
In one case the cottagers prefer to go nearly a quarter of a mile 
and dip their buckets in the nearest surface-stream rather than drink 
water from such a well close to their own doors. In another case, 
in the parish of Sandhurst, there are three wells on the same pre- 
mises, the situation of the house being a few feet only above the 
250-feet contour-line of the Military Ordnance Map, at about which 
level the uppermost clay-seam occurs throughout the district. One 
of these wells is only 10 feet deep, and yields good water; the other 
two are some 30 feet deep, and have long been disused on account 
of the unwholesome and objectionable character of the water which 
they draw from the sands beneath the clay. On the immediate 
confines of the Wellington College estate are two considerable villa- 
residences, the grounds of which are contiguous. A well at one of 
these only 8 or 10 feet deep furnishes good water, while at the 
adjoining house a deeper well, whose depth is such that it is sup- 
plied from the Middle Bagshot Sands, cannot, by all the means that 
have been tried, be made to furnish good water. But it is of no use 
to multiply instances, and I shall content myself therefore with 
citing one more, and that from the estate of Wellington College 
itself. A great part of this estate (some three-quarters of a mile in 
extent) is on the ferruginous sands (which, by the way, were in- 
cluded for very little reason by the Government Surveyors in the 
Middle Bagshot, and mapped accordingly). We have a surface- 
spring on the estate fed entirely from the ferruginous sands, and this 
yields, throughout the year, a plentiful supply of pure and whole- 
some water, which gives no deposit on standing. Analyses 
of the water from this spring, and from wells on the estate which 
occupy the same geological horizon, show only a mere trace of vegetable 
matter, not more than a small fraction of what is found in water 
drawn from the deeper Bagshot strata. 
Without going more into details here, we may safely assert that 
the whole of the well-water of the district which common human experience 
pronounces wholesome is drawn from the upper ferruginous sands. 
I have been informed by an eminent sanitary authority that the 
death-rate of the Sandhurst District is one of the lowest in England, 
and he used this fact as an argument against the notion of any 
deleteriousness attaching to vegetable contamination of water from 
