Half-a-dozen English Sewage Farms. 
43^ 
sewaged area a much larger agricultural return. Ordinary 
grazing and occasional mowings of land permanently laid down, 
after being properly arranged as a sewage farm, would very likely 
yield revenue enough to pay the labour bill and rent, which is 
what few sewage farms at present do. This, however, would 
be a very poor result of sewage irrigation; and it would never be 
satisfactory to throw to waste 200 ounces of ammonia per annum 
from every individual of a town population — regardless of ita 
enormous fertilising power — even though we had succeeded in 
our first purpose of destroying its power of creating a nuisance. 
The second lesson which agricultural experience hitherto of 
town sewage teaches applies to those who are bent upon making^ 
this farther use of it. They must not think that those plants 
which most require its ammonia, and phosphorus, and potash, are 
necessarily the plants best fitted for their purpose. They must 
choose such plants for cultivation as can prosper under the 
enormous quantities of water by which in sewage these ingre- 
dients are conveyed. Italian rye-grass is their principal resource, 
but cabbage, mangel wurzel, garden crops, and all other succulent 
growths, are suitable. 
It is not impossible that we may hereafter hit upon a crop 
rotation, including as its chief feature Italian rye-grass for 
summer use and mangel-wurzel for winter use, with sale enough 
of these and other produce for the purchase of whatever other 
food materials are required, by which the sewage of a town 
may be converted wholly into milk. And a most desirable 
and wholesome upshot this would be. The outcry that has 
been raised against the wholesomeness of food which has been 
grown, whether at first or second-hand, from sewage dressings 
has nowhere been justified by experience. Edinburgh for manv 
generations has been fed on sewage-produced milk. Merthyr 
has been fed to a large extent for several years on the garden-stuff 
produced abundantly upon Mr. Bailey Denton's filtering-ground, 
which is daily soused with tenfold the ordinary agricultural 
seAvage dressing. The inhabitants of Cheltenham and Leaming- 
ton, and the Eton boys — all of these being places where the 
authorities are naturally especially jealous for the wholesomeness 
of all their circumstances — are all of them fed more or less on. 
milk from cows feeding on sewage-grown grass. But this is a 
digression. 
The second lesson, then, of recent agricultural experience is 
that only plants of succulent growth deserve cultivation under 
sewage. Where the sewaged area is only a small part of a 
larger farm, the tenant can, no doubt, act as he pleases. He 
will of course have a large area in corn crops, and he may be 
