42 
Transactions Texas Academy oe Science. 
consists in the fact that Chicago, as you know, formerly discharged prac- 
tically all her sewage into the lake, from which she also drew her water 
supply. Since the opening of the Chicago Main Drainage Canal her 
sewage will go to the Mississippi river, and as a consequence St. Louis 
and other cities along the river are alarmed, and are considering meth- 
ods of water supply purification as a means of providing against infec- 
tion from the Chicago wastes. To give an idea of the saving of life 
accomplished by the change in the position of the intakes above referred 
to it will be' sufficient to say that for the three years following the change 
the total number of deaths from typhoid fever alone were 1280 less per 
year than for the three years preceding the change. 
During the year of 1899 the city of Philadelphia passed through a 
bitter experience in the matter of a typhoid epidemic. From January 
1, 1899, to April 5, 1899, there were 4864 cases of typhoid fever and 
485 deaths out of a population of 1,200,000, or an annual death rate of 
160 per 100,000. During one week one ward of the city had one person 
in every 2000 ill of typhoid fever and another ward had one in every 
3000 ill of the same disease. I have seen it stated, with how much truth 
I am unable to say, that investigation traced the origin of the disease to 
a single case that had occurred on the head waters of one of the tribu- 
taries of the stream that furnishes the water supply of the city, the 
wastes from the sick room having been carried into the stream. These 
appalling figures have finally forced the city to consider methods for 
purifying the city’s water supply — which it may be noted the city’s 
engineers had stenuously recommended for years previously, but which 
the press and the public had vigorously opposed because it involved the 
introduction of the (to them) odious water meters in order to reduce 
the wanton waste of water that now goes on. The daily water consump- 
tion is now 230 gallons for every man, woman and child in the city — 
an amount that it is manifestly impracticable to purify except at enor- 
mous cost. In a paper read before the American Waterworks Associa- 
tion, at Kichmond, Va., meeting from May 15 to 18, 1900, John C. 
Trautwine, Jr., of Philadelphia, read a paper entitled “Water- works 
Management — Professional and Councilmanic,” in which he showed, by 
means of a diagram, the rate of increase in the consumption from about 
72 gallons per capita per day in 1885 to about 225 gallons per capita 
per day in 1898, and this has grown to the 230 gallons per capita per 
day since that time. Contrasted with this he shows on the same diagram 
how the daily consumption in Milwaukee has fallen off from about 225 
gallons in 1882 to 80 gallons in 1898. In 1882 Milwaukee had less than 
two per cent of taps metered while in 1895 there were about sixty- two 
per cent, of them metered. This would seem to indicate that about 
sixty-five per cent, of the water used in 1882 was wasted, and that prob- 
