Sewage Disposal and Rivers Pollution. 343 
beset the application of pressure from headquarters, all but the 
smallest towns and villages have made some struggle to achieve a 
pure water supply and to dispose of their filth innocuously. In 
respect of the amount of money expended in these efforts, too, we 
probably need not fear comparison with our rivals, but if we ask 
ourselves how much of this money has been wisely expended, and how 
much direct useful knowledge we have obtained by the expenditure, 
we have little reason for self-gratulation. Expensive evidence has 
been taken again and again before Royal Commissions, and expensive 
battles have been fought between chemists and engineers, lawyers pro 
and con., local boards and aggrieved individuals, municipalities and 
the central government and the conservancy boards. How much has 
been expended either by the Local Government Board or by Muni- 
cipalities and Local Boards in direct, unbiassed, scientific experiment 1 
To take a concrete example, the Metropolitan Board of Works has 
spent, and was spending down to the time of its dissolution, vast 
sums in connexion with the question. Can we trace any scrap of 
scientific knowledge of sewage treatment to its initiative 1 True, 
that its doings are often quoted in discussions like the one we are re- 
viewing, but only to spice the narrative with a nuisance big enough 
to strike the imagination by its millions of tons, or a bill for dis- 
infectants running into many hundreds of thousands of pounds ; 
certainly not as an example to be followed, or as a source of accurate, 
well-ascertained, and exhaustive information. Yet it is not too 
much to say that the metropolitan authorities might, by systematic 
experiments ad hoc, carried on by competent persons under their 
own control (not by chartering scientific advice at haphazard), have 
long ago completely solved the problem of sewage purification and 
be at the present moment discharging a clear and sweet effluent 
into the Thames. Even failing this they might have abandoned the 
attempt and addressed themselves with success to the alternative of 
excluding the sewage from the river altogether and removing it to 
a distance for disposal. 
We cannot wonder, then, that the author has to go far afield 
for examples of carefully conducted experiments throwing new light 
on the question, or that the most instructive citations are the experi- 
ments of the Massachusetts State Board of Health on sewage 
filtration, and the successful working of the Berlin sewage farms. 
A detailed account of these farms was given by Mr. Roechling in a 
paper read in 1892 before the Institution of Civil Engineers. One 
of the speakers, after remarking that London, 1 with its five millions 
a proposed scheme of sewerage, the strongest opposition was offered by a large 
majority of the townspeople, headed by the vicar and supported by the prin- 
cipal doctor. The scheme, however, has been carried out, and the opening of 
the old house-drains and Cesspools revealed a frightful state of things. Long 
lengths of pipes choked full of deposit, and cesspools within three or four feet 
of the back doors, brimful of the foulest sewage, nearly level with the surface 
of the ground, abounded all through the town.” 
1 Of course this applies only to the Metropolitan District. Some of the 
suburban boards (notably Wimbledon) have led the van of intelligent land 
treatment. 
