130 
THE. LONDON SEWAGE COMPANY. 
Sliarighai oil pla n t. It is grown over the 
whole country round that city for oil. 
The Chdsan Han-Tsi. — Mr. Fortune 
staffs that it is " a vegetable used as spinach 
by the Chinese. This variety grows strongly, 
and ought to be sown in beds or rows rather 
thinly." 
It proves to be the Amaranthus oleraceus 
of Linnaeus. 
Stems erect, from 2 to 3 feet high, chan- 
nelled, pale green ; branches nearly round ; 
leaves oval, cuneate at the base, 3 to 4 inches 
broad, and 5 to 6 inches long when well- 
grown. Petioles slender, 2 to 3 inches in 
length, of a still paler green than the stems. 
Flowers axillary, crowded, pale green. 
It requires to be grown in a very rich light 
soil, and a rather moist temperature of about 
60°. If proper accommodation can be afforded 
the seeds may be sown at any time, and the 
leaves will be fit for use in two months after. 
Some plants were put out in June, on a warm 
border, but did not succeed. At the first 
gathering, the tops may be cut off, and fresh 
leaves will be thrown out, but they will be 
smaller than those first produced. 
A few leaves of sorrel improve the common 
spinach. The Han-tsi possesses in itself a 
very slight but agreeable acidity which renders 
the above addition unnecessary. It is to be 
regretted that it is not yet sufficiently hardy 
to succeed out of doors ; but it can be easily 
cultivated in pits or in pots in any forcing- 
house, and thus afford an additional variety to 
the culinary list even in winter.— Seeds of 
this vegetable were dispatched in a letter sent 
hi) Mr. Fortune, dated Chusan, September, 
1S44, and received at the Garden, January 
9th, 1845. 
THE LONDON SEWAGE COMPANY; 
A NEW SODBCE OF NATIONAL WEALTH AND POWEB. 
"Were we to announce the enormous value 
of the manure which flows into the Thames 
from London and Southwark, our readers 
would hardly give us credit for veracity ; but 
it is a fact, that while the most uncivilized 
countries, value and appropriate such refuse as 
a fertilizer for the land, (preferring the most 
offensive mode of saving and transmitting it, 
to wasting it,) England pollutes her rivers 
with it, and loses it altogether. Many pro- - 
jects have been submitted from time to time 
for saving and selling it to the cultivators of 
the land ; and when it is considered that an 
enormous expenditure has been incurred for 
the excrement of birds from abroad, and more 
than a million of money has been, we had 
almost said, thrown away for the foreign 
article, while that which is at home could be 
placed upon the land withoui one shilling of 
money leaving the country, the entire expen- 
diture being appropriated to British labour, 
and material for building;, and render all foreign 
articles of the kind useless, it seems to us a 
strange perversion of knowledge as well as of 
monejr,:.^ have allowed such an event to come 
off ; but it would be worse, now that our eyes 
are open to the fact, to continue this unnatural 
practice of buying abroad, what is only a sub- 
stitute for that which is wasted at home. We 
have said that many schemes have been pro- 
pounded for saving the sewage of London. 
It was the extravagance of each project that 
defeated it. Among the most widely pub- 
lished was one for carrying the liquid by 
means of pipes through the country, and on to 
the yarious farms, in the same way that gas 
and water for domestic purposes are conveyed. 
The folly of this has been well exposed in the 
Report of Thomas Wicksteed, Esq., Engineer 
to the London Sewage Company. We shall 
not follow this gentleman through all his 
exposures of the absurdities on which the plan 
was founded, but some of them are worth a 
distinct notice. For instance, two analyses 
of the liquid, which we may call sewage water, 
show that it contains one pint in 236 of solid 
manure (Aikin), or one pint in 214 (Phillips). 
Now whoever conceived the idea of conveying 
236 tons of liquid for the sake of the one ton 
of solid manure it contained, must be little 
short of an idiot; and we are quite prepared, 
after such a display of inventive genius, for 
any extravagance to match. The idea of lay- 
ing down pipes, for instance, to eight millions 
of acres, for the purpose of squirting the liquid 
manure over them at the rate of 236 tons for 
every ton of solid manure to be deposited, is 
worthy of almost any hair-brained schemer : 
but Mr. Wicksteed's mode of treating this is 
perhaps worth quoting. 
" For who would think of laying pipes over 
eight million of acres, embracing the whole 
area of the following counties ; viz. Middlesex, 
Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, Wilts, Dorset- 
shire, Berks, Oxfordshire, Bucks, Herts, and 
Essex? In addition to this, it may be sup- 
posed, the inhabitants of the numerous large 
towns in those counties would be as desirous 
as the inhabitants of the metropolis, both for 
reasons of health and profit, to get rid of their 
sewage water ; and how can it be expected 
that the landowners near those towns should 
seek from the metropolis that which they can 
obtain at much less cost in their own imme- 
diate neighbourhood? Nevertheless, as the 
evidence given before the Health of Towns 
Commission, in which the practicability of 
such a scheme is attempted to be shown, is 
continually quoted, and has very recently been 
so in a report on the improvement of Leicester, 
