468 



solutions for the purposes assigned would be to enlarge ray 

 paper to undue proportions, and I must therefore content 

 myself with giving you, in very few words, the results of 

 comparisons made by me of their respective virtues when 

 similarly tested. 



All the preparations, when suitably applied, greatly di- 

 minish foetid exhalations, whether arising from the chambers 

 of the sick, from privies, drains, and water-closets, or from 

 decomposing animal muscle and bone ; though none so per- 

 fectly in my experiments as does that of Labarrhaque, or 

 Beaufoy's solution of lime. The habitual use of the lead 

 leaves a grey crust on the pan or water-closet basin; there 

 is less of this with the zinc, and none of it with the others. 

 They all preserve the closet and house sink-drains sweet. 

 With urine the lead precipitates a copious white deposit, 

 and still leaves a strong smell of urea ; there is less of this 

 odour with zinc, and none at all when similarly treated with 

 the lime. Except an instantaneous effect be desired, and the 

 room unusually large, the hanging up of wet sheets in the 

 wards of the sick to purify the tainted air is unnecessary 

 with the lime, and a practice which might be objectionable to 

 nurses and other attendants, from the diffusion of so much 

 moisture into the atmosphere. The frequent mopping of 

 the floors with the solutions is open to the same difficulty, 

 and needless with that of Beaufoy. In fact, I prefer the 

 liquid chloride of lime to any of the other proposed fluids, 

 for the following principal reasons : — 



1st. Because in infected apartments we have the noxious 

 effluvia diff'used throughout their limits in the gaseous form, 

 a state similar to that in which the chlorine is evolved. 



2nd. Because the atmosphere thus contaminated presents 

 a more favourable medium to the prompt exercise of the 

 marked affinities of chlorine for one of the elements of all 

 the most common and the most offensive of the compound 



