yards, I know as the result of enquiry what they were there for : 

 they were there to gather rags, and those rags were subsequently 

 torn up into flock without undergoing any previous purification. 

 And that flock was sold to furniture makers to stuff" couches and 

 chairs — and not inferior furniture alone, but the very best kinds 

 as well as the worse. I know all this from enciuiry among the 

 trade. Possibly this stuff may be comparatively harmless when 



that may be I lia\e always consistently advocated its destruction 

 in furnaces, Ijecause 1 know that wherever it is not so destroyed 

 it is always us-:/! to make foundations good, and to make the 

 building of inhabited houses easier on irregular sites. There are 

 plenty of places where this has been done in Sydney. 



Mr. JMooHK— With regard to the illness of those who worked 

 in the sewei-s thei-e the smell was concentrated, and I believe it is 

 admitted l)y medical men that a concentrated smell is dangerous. 



Dr. TnoMPSOX— Concentrated arsenic will kill you in three 

 hours, and dilute arsenic from the wall-paper will kill you not less 

 surely, though it may take three months to do so. 



WELL AND RIVER WATERS OF NEW SOUTH WALES. 



By W. A. Dixox, F.LC, F.C.S., Lecturer on Chemistry, 



Sydney Technical College. 



[Read before the Royal Society of N.S.W., December 4, 1889.'] 



Some years since I contributed to the Proceedings of this Society 

 a paper on the " Deep well-waters of Sydney," and since then I 

 have made a numl)er of analyses of waters from various parts of 

 the country. Separate analyses of waters generally are not of 

 value for any scientiflc purpose, but when numerous analyses are 

 collected they do become of value, and this paper must be taken 

 only as a slight contribution towards a knowledge of our under- 



The subject of the composition of waters seems likely to become 

 of gre.it in>portance before long, owing to the efforts being put 



