724 
UTILISATION OF SEWAGE. 
covered to purify, for drinking and culinary purposes, water 
which has been once infected by town sewage. By no known 
mechanical or chemical means can such water be more than 
partially cleansed; it is always liable to putrify again. Pro¬ 
cesses of filtering and deodorisation cannot, therefore, be 
relied upon to do more than mitigate the evil. Water which 
appears perfectly pure to the eye is sufficient, under certain 
conditions, to breed serious epidemics in the population 
which drinks it. Soils, however, and the roots of growing 
plants, have a great and rapid power of abstracting impurities 
from sewage water, and rendering it again innocuous and 
free from contamination. Mr. Ffennell, the Chief Inspector 
of Fisheries, stated in his evidence that sewage water, in a 
putrifying state, is destructive to fish; a considerable increase 
in the amount of food for the people, and of revenue to the 
owners of rivers, would therefore result from purifying the 
rivers of the United Kingdom which are now contaminated 
by sewage and other matters. The removal of house refuse 
to the land would now be much easier and cheaper than it 
was formerly; because carriage by suspension in a liquid is 
the cheapest mode of transport. In many towns of Lancashire 
there are to this day numerous cesspits. This is the case 
with Manchester, where the local authorities expend about 
£20,000 a year for emptying them and removing the con¬ 
tents to the land, and receive back 50 per cent, by the sale 
of the material. We recommend that the important object 
of completely freeing the entire basins of rivers from pollu¬ 
tion should be rendered possible by general legislative enact¬ 
ment, enabling the inhabitants of such entire districts to 
adopt some controlling power for that purpose; but it should 
include a provision for compelling local boards to render the 
sewage of their districts innocuous by application to the land 
for agricultural purposes. The case of the valley of the 
Thames (where the purification of the river, which has been 
sought by the expenditure of enormous sums, is, to a con¬ 
siderable extent, counteracted by the increased discharge of 
sewage from towns higher up the stream) requires special 
and immediate attention.” 
