674 
UTILIZATION OF SEWAGE. 
tended with very great difficulties, and has begun to attract a 
great amount of attention; and I only wish to remind my 
friends—and I am happy to find one here who bears witness to 
it—that that subject was not overlooked by me more than 
twenty years ago. But as I have referred to it, perhaps you 
will not think it unduly trespassing upon your time if I ven¬ 
ture to call your attention very shortly to a practical illustra¬ 
tion of the benefit of it, which I have seen exhibited within 
my own knowledge, and under my own observation. Gentle¬ 
men, it may, perhaps, attach additional interest to the obser¬ 
vations which I am about to make, when I tell you that what¬ 
ever novelty there is in the discovery and in the application of 
the means, belongs not (to my knowledge) to any man now 
living, but belongs exclusively to the practical knowledge and 
experimental observation of his late lamented Royal Highness, 
the Prince Consort. He had applied his eminently practical 
mind, among others, to this subject, and he had made various 
experiments upon it, the result of one of which I have had 
the opportunity of seeing myself, and of noticing the import¬ 
ant effects produced upon the adjoining herbage at Osborne, in 
the Isle of Wight. That to which I am about shortly to call 
your attention, and I hope you will pardon me if I do call 
your attention to matters of this description, is an experiment 
which has been recently carried out, following the example of 
his late Royal Highness the Prince Consort, on a small scale 
certainly, at Wellington College. I may, in the first place, 
tell you, that the population of Wellington College, if I may 
so speak of it, is about 300 souls altogether, and there is 
attached to it a very large laundry for doing the washing of 
the whole establishment; and I mention this, not as an unim¬ 
portant fact, because it is important to have for these purposes 
a very large supply of water, and because those who know any¬ 
thing at all about it know that, for the production of vege¬ 
tables, and for the cultivation of flowers, also, there is nothing 
more stimulant than the application of soapsuds and refuse 
from the washhouses. Now, the novelty of the Wellington Col¬ 
lege experiment is this : as we had the usual cesspools—that I 
consider a disadvantage under which we laboured in the first 
instance—all we had to depend upon was the overflow of the 
liquid manure through pipes. This, following the plan of the 
Prince Consort, we conducted a short distance from the col¬ 
lege, into a tank, for the purpose of filtering. But it had been 
found, in all former experiments of filtering, that if you intro¬ 
duced the liquid at the top of the filter-bed, whatever there 
was of solid contents in it formed, in a short period, a cake at 
the top, and prevented the penetration of the water; and the 
novelty introduced by the Prince Consort was this, that the 
