386 APPENDIX. [No. XXXVI.A. 



Stock fed upon sewage farms, if mismanaged, suflFer materially, and in 

 tlie public interest should have stringent Government supervision before 

 they are admitted to be sold for human food. Information upon this 

 point was directly refused in August 1869, but a Government commission 

 with full powers may obtain valuable information. 



Credible and disinterested witnesses have written to me privately and 

 to the newspapers stating that they have used sewage grass, and yet their 

 milk and butter are excellent. In each of these oases the sewage is small. 

 It passes directly to the land, which is large in area in relation to the 

 amount of liquid, and it has not time to become putrid. Dr. Symes, of 

 the County Asylum, Dorchester, says cabbages grown on their ground 

 irrigated by sewage are good, and no fault is found with the milk and 

 butter. Dr. PhiUips, of the Devon County Asylum, says that the milk 

 and butter produced from their sewage-ground are excellent. Mr. Hales, 

 of the South Metropolitan Schools, states that the use of milk provided 

 from their sewage grass has been innocuous. 



After this evidence I must admit that fi-esh sewage under certain 

 circumstances may be safely applied over a large surface of land without 

 injury, and have so advised since this controversy. Nevertheless I should 

 myself prefer to keep milch cows from sewage altogether. 



Under all the facts of the case we are bound to admit that town sewage 

 irrigation as now practised is a failure, and dangerous to health. At 

 present there appears to be no plan which can be absolutely recommended, 

 but the question of sewage must be practically dealt with. If we look the 

 difficulty fairly in the face, we may rely that the intellect of man will 

 surely provide a remedy, and preserve for the community healthy milk and 

 wholesome meat. 



August 22. 



Typhoid fever is knovm to be propagated either by animal or vegetable 

 matter in decomposition, or by both together. Of the exact nature of 

 typhoid poison nobody knows. No person has ever isolated the poison. 

 No one has ever seen it. No one knows how typhoid fever originates, but 

 all medical men ti-ace it to putrid matters, and it is known particularly to 

 be transmissible from person to person by sewage. I have seen this terrible 

 disease at Naples and Florence, and had the misfortune to treat it in those 

 cities, and in both those places I had conference with the municipal 

 authorities for its prevention, and was authorized' by capitalists to offer a 

 million and a half of money to lessen the mischief by adequate water 

 supply and drainage. It is not known, when a number of persons are 

 exposed to typhoid poison, why some are affected and some escape, nor is 

 it known, either with typhoid fever or with cholera, why apparently the 

 same conditions do not at all times produce the same results. The human 

 mind is now in a curious state of embarrassment upon the question. The 

 sewage irrigators are irrational in their arguments. They form conclu- 

 sions without premises, and they reason as though logic was the art of 

 wrong reasoning. 



Medical men abhor putrid sewage, even in isolated patches, as the 

 focus of disease, from the poisonous effluvia which it exhales. Sewage 

 irrigators take a number of isolated putrid sewage foci, and describe the 

 vast resultant pestilential sewage swamp, the emanations from which are 



