480 Sanitary Reform and its Vagaries . [August, 
and that the report ultimately adopted was a mere one-sided 
affair. The said Committee is declared to have “ shown ” — 
a favourite word in the “ abstract ” before us — that “ as 
great a percentage of the manurial constituents of fcecal 
matters had been utilised as was on an average utilised of 
the best commercial manure.” Yet, unless our memory 
greatly deceives us, it has been admitted by Prof. Frankland 
that from one-half to two-thirds of the nitrogen present in 
sewage may pass away from an irrigation field in the effluent 
water ! This is very poor utilisation. 
The dangers from the proximity of sewage farms are by 
no means purely imaginary. Even in India, where lands 
are irrigated with plain river-water, and only when the state 
of the weather renders such irrigation needful, it has been 
found necessary to prevent irrigation from being carried on 
within a certain distance of villages and to interpose a screen 
of trees. Is it conceivable that irrigation as conducted in 
England, with sewage applied at all times instead of clear 
water, used only when needed, will be the safer ? If the 
proximity of a polluted stream is dangerous, is the danger 
lessened by spreading out the polluted waters over a larger 
area ? Sewage-fungus is by no means unknown in the water- 
courses issuing from irrigation farms. That disease-germs 
are not necessarily arrested or destroyed by passing water 
through a vast mass of earth is shown by the celebrated 
Swiss case described by Prof. Frankland, where a stream 
which soaked through a mountain conveyed disease from 
one valley to the next. 
As regards the economy of irrigation it has not been found 
upon the whole very satisfactory. Blackburn, Tunbridge 
Wells, and other places have found a sewage-farm a some- 
what costly luxury. The report issued by the Committee of 
the Local Government Board tells us duly, indeed, under 
each town, that the capital sunk in buying and laying out a 
sewage-farm will be paid off in so-and-so many years, and 
the rates will then be reduced by a certain figure in the 
pound. But this comforting assurance is built upon the 
somewhat doubtful assumption that a given number of cubic 
feet of soil can go on for ever disinfecting putrescent animal 
matter. It is highly probable that further outlay will be 
required for extensions. 
We fail to see, judging from the “abstract,” that Prof. 
Corfield has advanced anything which has not been asserted 
and re-asserted many times during the last ten years. He 
brings forward no new arguments against “ precipitation,” 
he overlooks the improvements which have been made in its 
