186 
Value of Earth- Closet Manure. 
By degrees the town authorities are learning the disagreeable 
lesson that materials which are excellent fertilizers when safely 
incorporated with the soil are a nuisance in a town, and cause 
expenses that are all the greater the more completely the plan 
of removal accords with the requirements of modern civilization. 
There is no doubt that excretal matters and all kinds of 
house-refuse are removed from towns more rapidly, with less 
nuisance to the inhabitants, and with less injury to their health, 
by means of water, than in any other way that can be adopted 
on a large scale. There can be, further, no doubt that the land 
is the proper medium for the reception of all excrementitious 
matters, and that nothing effects so complete and rapid a deodo- 
rization and disinfection of putrid animal matter of every kind 
as a well-aerated soil. 
Boussingault has shown that there is a larger proportion of 
oxygen in the air condensed between the particles of a porous 
soil than in the atmosphere above the land. In the condensed 
condition in which oxygen exists in a porous soil, it "no doubt 
acts much more powerfully in oxidizing organic matters than 
the free oxygen of the air. Its effects in that respect may indeed 
be compared with the effects of oxygen condensed in spongy 
platinum, which effects manifest themselves, as is well known, 
by the instantaneous production of light or heat — the visible effect 
of the chemical combination of hydrogen and oxygen, when a 
current of hydrogen is directed upon a pellet of spongy 
platinum. 
There is no oxidizing agent equal to a porous soil, which is 
always at hand in almost unlimited quantities, and equally 
effective in destroying animal effluvia and the permanently pre- 
judicial properties of excrementitious matters of every descrip- 
tion. Few axioms are so true as that which enforces the 
propriety of returning to the land the fertilizing materials 
which are removed from it in the produce. In other words, 
the nuisance of a town population ought to be utilized 
on the land for the production of food. The wonderful dis- 
infecting and absorbing properties of porous soils long ago 
attracted the attention of practical men and scientific observers ; 
but greater precision to chemical inquiries into these valu- 
able properties has been given only of late years by scientific 
chemists, after Mr. H. S. Thompson had made the discovery 
that soils not only possessed the power of absorbing certain 
volatile and foetid matters, but also of decomposing salts of 
ammonia, retaining the fertilizing base ammonia, and permit- 
ting the less important acid constituents of ammoniacal salts to 
percolate through the soil in combination with lime, magnesia, 
or other abundant soil constituents. In a series of classical 
