434 
Half-a-dozen English Seicage Farms. 
there be no temptation to anything like the costly or heroic style, 
proper enough, possibly, to architectural or engineering works, 
certainly not to agricultural works. No doubt, engineering 
skill will be necessary after the sewage has been delivered on 
the highest point of the land, but its regular distribution is 
even more an agricultural operation, and the more it is kept 
within the means and ideas of an intelligent tenant-farmer or 
market-gardener, the more likely is it to have a profitable result. 
It is true that sewaged lands are generally the most enormously 
manured, and the most extraordinarily productive lands known 
to agriculture ; but it is also well to bear in mind that sewage- 
water is the most dilute and poorest manure per ton that any of 
us know, that its effects are owing to the enormous quantities 
which we apply, and that any addition to the cost of its distri- 
bution must therefore be carefully avoided ; for, after all, it is 
on the power which a single man possesses, by lifting or shutting 
a hatch here and there, of distributing 500 tons per acre over 
eight or ten acres in a day that our hopes of a profitable result 
very materially depend in dealing with such a weak and dilute 
manure as sewage almost always is." 
The first lesson, then, that these and all other sewage farms 
may teach us is, that sewage — a very poor and weak manure — 
will not bear a heavy cost for distribution. The dirty water 
must indeed, at whatever cost, be brought to the land whether 
by pumping or by gravitation ; but that is the business of the 
town which desires its defalcation. It must be brought to every 
field upon the farm, but thereafter it must be distributed in 
the cheapest possible way. Plough-made furrows are enough to 
regulate the flow where sufficient slopes naturally exist ; and 
where the land is flat it must be laid out, after efficient drainage 
has been provided, in wide ridges, the surface soil being kept 
uppermost. The lighter, poorer, and more pervious soils, are 
to be preferred, and these are to be so laid out in lands that the 
sewage shall trickle downwards from a furrow along the ridge 
line, reaching the foot of the surface which it has to feed on either 
side, but sinking away in the process until there is nothing 
left for the midway furrows to remove. It is possible thus so to 
arrange the surface that a single man may be able, as I have 
said, to distribute 5,000 tons of sewage daily. The cost of 
labour rules here as in most other agricultural speculations ; and 
it may well be that a town shall resolve after having thus laid 
out its sewage farm to cover it with a coat of permanent grass, 
satisfied with thus ensuring the defalcation of its sewage at a 
minimum annual expense ; and regardless of the possibility, at 
a somewhat greater expense of labour, of obtaining from the 
