476 Sanitary Reform and its Vagaries: [August, 
a paper before a body which by its rules allows no man to 
bring before it matter not (in part, at least) the fruits of his 
own personal experience. This statement having been re- 
peated in a morning paper, a chemist and physicist, of 
world-wide celebrity, wrote to ask upon what evidence so 
extraordinary a didium was based ? His letter was refused 
insertion. 
As to the truth or falsehood of the assertion, let us re- 
member that a very great part of the arts of dyeing and 
colour-making depends on the property of precipitating 
dissolved — not suspended — organic matter, possessed by 
metallic salts. Or, turning to a diredt experiment, we would 
recommend all whom it may concern to take a sample of 
ordinary town-sewage, and filter it through a double-fold of 
the finest Swedish paper, so as to remove all suspended 
matter. If the bright, clear liquid which runs through is 
then mixed with a neutral solution of a salt, say of alumi- 
nium, it speedily becomes cloudy, and deposits a greyish 
precipitate. This deposit, if examined, is found to consist 
of nitrogenous organic matter along with a basic salt of 
aluminium. Comparative analyses of the water, before and 
after precipitation, corroborate the result, showing that the 
proportion of organic nitrogen is seriously lessened by the 
treatment with, e.g., aluminium chloride. We wish that the 
zealots of irrigationism would condescend to perform this 
simple experiment, and lay to heart its lessons. 
We turn to the late Royal Commission on the Pollution 
of Rivers, which lies sadly open to the charge of having 
merely sought for evidence in support of a foregone conclu- 
sion, carefully declining to see any fadls of different tendency. 
It might be pointed out as very strange that this Commission 
should have consisted of one chemist, two engineers, and not 
a single physician. We should have formed it of two phy- 
sicians and one chemist. But, passing over this peculiarity 
of constitution, let us ask what has become of the last report 
issued by the first Commission, of which Mr. Way was a 
member ? It is known to have been drawn up, at least as a 
rough draft, but it has never been issued to the public, nor 
has its non-appearance ever been accounted for. Such an 
occurrence conveys to our mind a very unpleasant im- 
pression. 
Among the strange, or rather the inexplicable, assertions 
made by the second Rivers’ Pollution Commission is the 
statement that a certain precipitation process could not be 
worked without causing a nuisance in the neighbourhood. 
It is no exaggeration to say that it would be easy to find a 
