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Villaf/e Sanitar/j Econoini/. 
the larger communities of cities and towns have taken the 
lead in obtaining a supply, those of small towns and villages 
have not been dead to the advantages of an increased use of 
water. Under the inHuence of wealth and combination the 
former have, for the most part^ secured not only a copious 
supply for domestic and public uses, but water-closets have been 
very commonly brought into use, with a svstem of underground 
sewers to carry away the sewage. To the extended use of water, 
consequent upon the introduction of the water-closet, is to be 
attributed the difficulties now attending the treatment and dis- 
posal of the refuse of towns and villages ; for the defilement of 
wells, rhe excrement-sodden condition of the soil surrounding 
dwellings, and the pollution of our rivers are gready to be attri- 
buted to it. Water-closets exist in all the better class of houses 
in the southern counties ; they are numerous in the northern 
counties, and are well-known and appreciated in the manufac- 
turing districts, where privies and cesspools almost generally 
prevail. Few villages, indeed, exist in which water-closets are 
not to be found in the better description of houses, and the 
comfort they afford is so generally acknowledged that it would 
doubtless operate against any other vehicle than water for the 
removal of refuse. At the same time, so much is to be said in 
favour of dry earth as a deodoriser and absorbent — the intro- 
duction of which valuable discovery is due to the Rev. Henry 
Moule, Vicar of Fordington, in Dorsetshire — and of the facilitv 
with which suitable earth can be obtained for use, and removed 
after use in rural villages, where scavenging can be organised 
and enforced, and where the expense of procuring a copious 
supply of water would, in a majority of cases, be dispropor- 
tionately great, that personal preference and prejudice must, in 
such cases, give way to economy. 
It is not impossible, however, tliat although up to this time 
all chemical processes have practically failed in purifying sewage, 
so that the effluent fluid may be discharged without injury into 
rivers, some process may yet be discovered whereby a portable 
manure may be prepared out of the bulky and unwieldy matter 
called "sewage," which may extract from it every particle of 
matter deleterious to human and productive of vegetable life, and 
which would be more profitable in an agricultural sense than the 
sewage itself. This object, however, appears very distant at 
present. It is indeed more than possible that even at this moment 
those substances of organic matter which are extracted from 
sewage by the partial processes in practice constitute an article 
more valuable, as a saleable manure, than the whole sewage from 
which it was taken — if we adopt as the test of value the return 
per head of tlie population contributing the sewage. But this is 
