188 
Value of Earth-Closet Manure. 
Although I have consistently advocated the wet system, or 
water-closet plan, for large towns, I am convinced that the dry 
or earth-closet plan is preferable to the adoption of sewage 
arrangements in villages or suburban districts, inhabited by people 
in a humble position of life ; and I would impress strongly upon 
Local Boards of Health the propriety of well considering whether 
in such localities the earth-closet system does not meet the 
sanitary requirements of the case, before they have recourse to 
expensive sewage operations entailing, as they do everywhere, a 
more or less considerable tax upon the people, whose earnings 
are such as require to be expended according to the strictest 
rules of economy. It is obvious that if a plan could be devised 
by which human excretal matters could be collected and removed 
from dwellings, without either nuisance or injury to health, and 
obtained economically in a concentrated, dry, and portable con- 
dition, their utilization would be much more perfectly attained 
by such means than by the water-system. The questions naturally 
present themselves, does the earth-closet plan meet these demands, 
and is it applicable for towns as well as for the country ? 
The objections which are made to the dry or earth-closet 
system are : — 
1. The difficulties and expense of the supply and preparation 
of the soil in the case of towns. 
2. The cost of carriage of a bulky earth compound to the 
country. 
3. The fact that but little of the urine, containing in round 
numbers ^ths of the manuring constituents of mixed solid and 
liquid human excreta, would reach the earth compost ; and 
4. That in the manure produced, the more valuable fertilizing 
matters are so largely diluted with comparatively useless common 
earth, that beyond a very short distance from the locality where 
the earth compost is produced the cost of carriage would be 
greater than the manure is worth. 
These objections, it must be confessed, are not readily met in 
the case of towns, for the difficulties and the expense of pro- 
curing a supply of suitable earth, of storing it, preparing it for 
repeated use, and the cost of removal of the compost to the 
country are no doubt so great that, even admitting that by the dry 
plan human excreta could be removed from towns as rapidly 
and with as much salubrity as by the wet or water system, the 
latter would be j)referable in an economical point of view, unless 
it could be shown that the earth or dry system really produces a 
concentrated manure of intrinsic value. VVe are thus led to 
inquire into the composition and money value of the manure 
which can be produced by the repeated use of prepared soil, as 
recommended bv Mr. Moule. 
