House and Garden 
A bath-room of Moorish design with Roman or tiled pool-bath, sunk in floor 
from the simple germ of decay to disease germs possi¬ 
bly dangerous to human life. This fact makes a 
wooden floor or wainscoting a most unsanitary 
arrangement for a bath-room. 
It is impossible to keep a wooden floor, that is being 
constantly spattered with water and dirt, in a sanitary 
condition. It can be washed so that it will look 
bright and clean, but this is simply because the germs 
that are bred in the wood itself and in the cracks 
between the boards are not visible to the naked eye. 
Scientific investigation has demonstrated that the 
decay of wood and the peculiar musty odor arising 
from old wooden floors are due to a germ, called 
“anaerobic,” because it lives away from air and 
light. No amount of scrubbing will remove these 
germs as they live inside the wood itself, and the very 
washing supplies the moisture which is necessary to 
the existence of the microbe. Neither will washing, 
cleaning nor ventilation eradicate the peculiar musty 
odor, which it causes. To avoid this offensive micro¬ 
organism, and for other sanitary reasons, the use of an 
inorganic floor in the bath-room is to-day regarded 
as absolutelv essential. 
J 
Of the inorganic floor coverings, tiling, marble and 
cement are the most usual. Marble, however, is not 
an absolutely non-porous material. This fact has 
been demon¬ 
strated by an 
experiment, 
whereby a 
lighted candle 
on the opposite 
side of a mar- 
b 1 e slab, an 
eighth of an 
inch thick, was 
blown out by a 
strong bellows. 
As a carbonate 
of lime, mar¬ 
ble is not abso¬ 
lutely sterile as 
far as germs 
are concerned. 
Modern scien¬ 
tists have dis¬ 
covered that 
bacteria of all 
kinds are vege- 
table organ¬ 
isms; and it is 
well known 
that lime is an 
essential to all 
vegetable life. 
Th is fact, to¬ 
gether with its 
expense, virtu¬ 
ally excludes marble from use as floors and walls 
in hospitals, where an absolutely germ proof material 
is necessary. 
Cement floors, even apart from their non-decora- 
tive appearance, are not to be used in a bath-room, 
because cement wears rough, and the small recesses 
thus formed in it, become filled with dirt and foreign 
matter of all kinds, which it is virtually impossible to 
remove. Consequently a cement floor is never thor¬ 
oughly sanitary. 
1 he ideal covering for the floors and walls of 
Decorative colored wall tile for bath-room 
120 
