Half- a-dozen English Sewage Farms. 
433 
sewage farms which I have more particularly described. All of 
them, however, may be properly named, to show that it is not 
without considerable knowledge and experience of the subject that 
I now proceed to discuss the lessons which they appear to teach. 
In the first place, we may notice how ludicrously experience 
hitherto has almost everywhere upset the anticipations of the 
saneuine sewage agriculturist. What has become of the esti- 
mates, the commonplaces, as they may be called, of all previous 
writings (some of them my own) on the sewage question from the 
agricultural point of view ? — " A man as good as a sheep," worth, 
therefore, at least 5s. a year for the mere faecal waste, in either 
case, of the animal ! " Land a mere machine, of which the value 
necessarily hinges on the quantity of raw material which can be 
passed through it in a given time " ! " The experience at Edin- 
burgh, where a rent of more than 20/. an acre is annually paid for 
the sewaged meadows, of course attainable elsewhere " ! Nothing 
of all this has been realised ; 40,000 " man " have not raised the 
fertility of the Cheltenham sewage-farm so much as 400 sheep 
could have raised it. The poor sands and clays of the Tunbridge 
Wells farms, dealing as a machine with the enormous quantity 
of raw material supplied to them, more than 1,000,000 tons of 
sewage annually, have not been able to convert the fertilising 
matter from 80 " man " per acre, so as to pay their rent. Nowhere 
has the Edinburgh experience been realised. Everywhere else we 
have had to encounter the great difficulty of making a market for 
our produce — a market which has from time immemorial existed 
there. The disappointment has arisen from the one-sided view 
that has been taken of the question— the enormous quantity of 
fertilising matter at present going to waste alone occupying 
attention. Such quantities of ammonia, phosphorus, and potash 
in this sewage — equal, at the rate of application, to tons of 
guano annually on every acre — were certain to produce the very 
maximum of agricultural return, and needed, or at any rate 
deserved, the most perfect, not to say costly, equipment of land 
and farm for their reception. On this point — here also happily 
able to quote myself — I will extract a Avarning written so long 
ago as 1869, in a report to the West Derby Board of Health, 
who were then contemplating the adoption of the agricultural 
remedy for their sewage nuisance — a warning which was not 
taken then, and is still as necessary now : — " Having obtained 
the land, I would not interfere at once even with the existing 
tenancy, except to reserve the right to take field after field in 
hand as may be necessary for the purpose of fitting it for the 
reception of the sewage. And this gradual and, so to speak, 
domestic way of working out the problem, I advise, in order that 
