348 
Sewage Disposal and Rivers Pollution. 
The farms were situated in the midst of the surrounding populous vil- 
lages, and the money spent upon them amounted, on March 31, 1800, to 
1 ,178,648/. At first a good many complaints were raised by the adjoining 
owners against the sewage farms, and several Royal Commissions were 
appointed to inquire into their condition. As a result of these inquiries the 
Town Council of Berlin adopted very stringent regulations for the manage- 
ment of the farms, and for the sewaging of each field in particular. Gradually 
the complaints about the farms ceased, and now adjoining owners were 
anxious to sewage their own land or to hire portions of the sewaged land 
from the Corporation. The Berlin authorities rightly laid great stress upon 
a most careful systematic sewaging of the land, as, without it, the results 
from the farms, both commercially and from a sanitary point of view, must 
be mere matters of chance. They had now quite an army of thoroughly 
trained sewage men, which enabled them to cope most successfully with 
sewage irrigation upon a scale that was at present without a parallel. 
As to the financial results obtained from the farms, he might say that 
the profit of management, expressed as the rate of interest on capital outlay, 
amounted to a little more than 2£ per cent, in the year ending March 31, 
1891, and this, it would be admitted, was a very fair interest in these days. 
Concerning the degree of purification attained on the farms, he might 
point out that, though they had absorbed over 350 millions of tons of sewage 
since they were first laid out, they had turned out a most excellent effluent, 
in which only from about 5 to 10 per cent, of the dissolved organic pollution 
present in the raw sewage remained. These results had not been obtained 
from a few isolated analyses made now and then, but from about three hun- 
dred analyses regularly carried out during the last ten years or more. He 
knew of no chemical treatment that was able to show such good results for 
so long a period. 
A good deal had been said against sewage farms on account of the 
unhealthy conditions of life they were apt to produce, but that such was 
not the case on the Berlin farms was evident from a careful perusal of the 
mortality figures observed on them. He would only mention that, though 
a severe epidemic of typhoid fever was raging in the eastern and northern 
portions of the city at the commencement of 1888, yet no case of this fever 
was reported from the farms throughout the year. The authorities had now 
established four convalescent , homes, with 286 beds in all, on the farms, 
which were supplied with water from wells sunk on the spot, and were doing 
excellent work. 
Much of the success obtained at Berlin is confessedly due to 
skilled management and thorough organisation of the labourers 
employed, the farms being cut up into small areas to which the 
sewage is applied in the most carefully planned and systematic 
manner. But it is evident that what has been done there can be 
done elsewhere, if only the like conditions are observed. 
Coming to those cases where sewage in its crude state is unsuit- 
able for application to land, it is here that previous chemical treat- 
ment becomes a valuable auxiliary. The sewage of some towns, e.g. 
Wolverhampton, contains iron and sometimes compounds abso- 
lutely injurious to vegetation. In other towns, especially where 
the sewage is concentrated, it forms a slimy impervious deposit on 
the soil, similar to j) ap ier-mdche, which soon prevents filtration 
altogether. True that this can sometimes be overcome by periodi- 
cally allowing the deposit to dry, and breaking up the surface with 
