No. XXXVI.A.] APPENDIX. 387 



concentrated and overpowering, as a sanitary panacea. When the 

 absurdity is demonstrated, they retreat under the charge of mismanage- 

 ment; but sewage farms, as they are now laid out, cannot be managed 

 other than to be an offensive and dangei'ous hotbed of disease, liable to be 

 active at any moment. When disease is charged against them, the sewage 

 irrigators falsely reason thus — sewage irrigation is good, ergo some other 

 cause for disease must exist. Chemists have wisely pointed out the danger 

 of putrefying matter in water, even in small quantities. They have carried 

 their doctrine to such an extent that a grain or two of nitre in a gallon of 

 water condemns that water for town use, on the ground that possibly nitre 

 may have come from the nitrogen of previous sewage contamination, 

 although at the moment utterly changed to chemical salts. The sewage 

 irrigators cover the ground wi'th putrid matter, poison wholesale the wells 

 of the district, let some of the sewage pass unchanged into the rivers, to 

 be drunk unawares by the neighbouring villagers. The so-called sanitary 

 guardians relieve a town at the expense of the suburbs. All this is done 

 at an enormous cost to the ratepayers on the ground of danger to health ; 

 but the aggregation of danger to the suburban residents is called in- 

 nocuous irrigation. Sewage logic is as bad as sewage irrigation — one 

 focus of disease is dangerous, a thousand foci aggregated together ai-e 

 innocuous. Milk is known to be a conveyer of typhoid poison. Sewage 

 on a single farm is rightly condemned, but an aggregation of a hundred 

 farms with sewage to constitute a sewage farm is considered by the sewage 

 theorists free from harm. 



When cows feed on farms where sewage is, or feed on a sewage farm, 

 the labourers, it is alleged, make the quantity of milk for sale increased in 

 volume by directly adding sewage to the milk ; but no proprietor has ever 

 been made by custodians of sewage farms to punish those guilty of such a 

 horrible crime. Cows drink sewage — in fact, its saline character makes 

 them prefer it ; and whether it be sewage on a farm or the sewage of a 

 sewage farm, the milk, after the cow has drunk the sewage, becomes 

 contaminated, is capable of putrescence, and therefore forms putrescible 

 matter, in which typhoid poison may revel. Plants which grow on farms 

 which have recent putrid sewage, take up into their composition and juices 

 the manurial matters. These remain unchanged for some time in the 

 plant, and during that period make the plant liable to .pjitregcence and to 

 be poisonous to man and injurious to animals. The power ;which plants 

 possess of changing matters which they imbibe is not always equal. It 

 differs with the states of atmosphere and with the seasons. Heat and cold 

 modify this power. Light, dai'kness, or the quality of the light, or even 

 the hygi'ometrio state of the air, influences the I'esult, so that at every 

 period the same class of plants must of necessity have a variation in its 

 power of assimilating sewage. How putrid sewage, when absorbed, is 

 converted into plant-structures, is not known, as botanists generally 

 believe that animal matters are converted into ammonia or nitrates befoi'e 

 they undergo their changes into vegetable tissues. When cows eat plants 

 containing unchanged manurial products, the milk is tainted. It putrefies, 

 and the putrescent mUk may be as liable to communicate typhoid poison 

 as the putrescent water was before it was taken into the plant. 



In the case of the recent epidemic, the sewage on the farm was 

 either added directly to the milk, which I hesitated to believe, or the cows 



2 c 2 



