24B 
LIFE OF DEAN BUCK LAND. 
[CH. IX. 
report of the Commission employed to look into the health 
of London. The Commissioners reported as follows :— 
“ Daring the cleansing of the Westminster Abbey pre¬ 
cincts, in the autumn of 1848, four hundred cubic yards of 
foul matter had been removed from the various branches of 
the ancient sewers, which were obliterated and filled up 
with earth. An entirely new system of drainage by pipes 
alone was then substituted, and not a single case of failure 
had been discovered by careful examinations made weekly 
ever since the new pipe-drainage had been laid down.” 1 
As a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers Buck- 
land exerted himself actively in the improvement of the 
supply of pure water for the Metropolis, and examined the 
projects for obtaining it from the Thames and from other 
rivers, and from wells sunk in the chalk. Of all the various 
plans an artesian well in the Isle of Dogs was at that time 
found to yield the purest water. On the outbreak of the 
cholera, in 1848, Buckland, anxious as ever to benefit his 
fellow-creatures, collected a mass of information less on the 
treatment of the disease than on its prevention by care in 
sanitary arrangement of the houses both of rich and poor, 
and on the properties of disinfectants, with the most effica¬ 
cious mode of applying them. He was far ahead of his 
day in sanitary science, and, like sanitary reformers of the 
present time, met with endless objections to his advice to 
“ clean up.” In a sermon which he preached in the Abbey 
on November 15th, 1849, the day of thanksgiving to God 
for the removal of the cholera, he observed in allusion to 
the Westminster fever, “ A warning voice had not been 
1 “ Report of the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers.” 
