Village Sanitary Economy. 
23^ 
for collecting: water from the atmosphere on tlie tops of the 
chalk clowns, has been found useful for the supply of live stock ; 
and when the scientific principle upon which they are founded is 
better understood, it is not impossible it may be found more 
generally applicable. Any treatise, therefore, which professed 
to deal with village sanitary arrangements, would be incomplete 
if some reference, cursory though it b?, were not made to both 
these valuable expedients. Neither, however, possess properties 
sufficiently certain for general adoption. 
Third : Village Sewerage.* 
The necessity of effecting the sewerage of villages, in order that 
the refuse may be removed in an inoffensive manner, is no longer 
a debateable question. Considerations of the public health abso- 
lutely demand the removal of all sewage from human habita- 
tions ; and the legal obligation to abstain from polluting the 
rivers and watercourses of the country will compel village com- 
munities, as well as those of cities and towns, to desist from the 
present practice of discharging their noxious matter without 
regard to its ultimate destination. Considerations of national 
economy would also demand, with almost equal force, that 
human excreta, as well as the excretions of animals, should be 
returned to the land from which their constituents have been 
extracted by vegetation which has served for food for man and 
animals. The point to be determined at the present moment is 
not whether a perfect removal of house-refuse is to be accom- 
plished, but how it is to be done without injury to others, at a 
reasonable cost, and with the greatest probability that the sewage 
will be returned to the land, from which the excrementitious 
matter was originally derived, with the best — i. e. the most 
profitable — result to agriculture. It is often asked why the sani- 
tary condition of the country is so much more pressing now 
than it was in the last generation, and why so much more value 
should be attached to organic refuse as a reproductive material. 
The answer is a very simple one. The population of England 
and Wales, and all the demands arising from that population, 
have doubled themselves in the last fifty years. In the year 
1811, the number of people was a little over 10 millions; in 
1861 it exceeded 20 millions. The use of water has grown at 
even a greater rate than the population — in many instances to 
the prejudice of both health and economy indirectly ; and though 
descriptions of " fog-ponds ; " also to the last number of tlie Society's Journal 
for some observations on the wold ponds of Yorkshire. 
* The British Association at its meeting at Norwich, in 1868, appointed a Com- 
mittee to inquire into the treatment and utilization of sewage, which is still 
engaged in the investigation. 
