agreeably, of the impurities of our great cities, it is surprising that some one has not proposed to supersede coal-gas by a judicious extraction and condensation of the rich sulphuretted hydrogen which they are ceaselessly generating. Paradoxical as it may seem, this climax of all known nuisances can be attributed to nothing else but the rapid progress of sanitary organisation. It is a lesson on half measures. The organisation has been more energetic than complete. It has pushed its material up to a certain point, and left it there. The wondrous organisation by which Napoleon conveyed so many men into Russia, made the fate of his army all the more disastrous, since it did not extend to carrying them back again; and so of the organisation of our sanitary reformers, which takes the filth of London into the Thames, but does not carry it out again. To understand the matter fully, let us cast a thought backwards. The removal of impurities by hydraulic gravitation is an invention of late times, like gaslight and steamengines. People who live in wellconditioned houses wonder how their forefathers could have lived without modern improvements; but they did live, and enjoyed life, and were not entirely destitute of purity, either in body or mind. There were probably many places in their time having an evil odour, and the removal of the impurities of London must have been a nasty business, as we may see in some of Hogarth's prints, especially in his "Night and Morning." A friendly shower was often a great relief; and as it did not then descend into the cavernous recesses of sewers, it swept the streets like a mountain torrent. "How it gushes and struggles out, Across the window pane Like a river down the gutter roars Such a working off of superficial impurities would naturally dirty the edge of the river for a time, and it VOL. LXXXV.—NO. DXX. doubtless received a continual supply from Fleet ditch and other exits. But these would be but a driblet compared to that mighty volume of waters; and in the days when aldermen had a stout preference for Thames salmon-a natural production which sounds as obsolete as the ichthyosaurus - greatly preferring it with its fresh flavour to the boiled commodity from Scotland, the Thames was perhaps a pellucid and nearly a pure stream. Of the filth which was not then carried away by the river, perhaps a considerable percentage remained in the shape of a permanent nuisance. But the great bulk of it must have been removed somehow, and applied to innocuous and useful purposes. It may, indeed, be counted one of the wise adjustments of Providence for the preservation of organic life, that all decaying and putrifying animal or vegetable matter torments us by its odours until it is applied to that only purpose which removes its offensiveness the replacement of new forms of organic life; until-to speak more briefly and practically— it is employed in agriculture. All filthy and offensive things are applicable to this purpose; it is the only purpose that removes their offensiveness; and they continue their attacks onthat department of human sensation which is most immediately susceptible to their influence-the olfactory nerves-until they are hidden out of sight in the earth, and placed in a position to carry on their proper function of reproduction, through which they come forth in the broad fields of corn, or the sweet-scented flowers that greet us when we step abroad in the early summer mornings. Thus, even in the filthiest places, there is generally but a per-centage of the actual putrifying organic them the great bulk being, as it matter which has been created in were, by a natural law, removed to perform its legitimate function in the soil. Let us now see what immediate effect the injunctions of the school of sanitary reformers were calculated to have on such general conditions. Their chief injunctions may P from starvation, he had to quit Nürnberg, where he had so long been known and respected, as a religious, honourable, punctual citizen. With what thoughts he must have endured this punishment, if he felt himself innocent! What he really felt was never known to others than his family; nor was there ever any clue as to whether he really continued to believe what he had so steadfastly asserted. After such a case, the value of a single witness, however explicit his statement, and however honourable his character, necessarily became comparatively slight. No two persons would be likely to have had precisely the same illusion; and unless two persons swear to a fact, jurisprudence very properly sees a possibility of the witness being in error. And the unhappy accused? Public opinion of course turned completely round, and every one was anxious to help by sympathy, or friendly offices, those whom it had so unjustly condemned. It is not recorded how many gossips on door-steps and in beer-houses asserted that they had always thought the accused were innocent; but we may be sure that this ex-post-facto clearsightedness was abundantly proclaimed. nert, indeed, had lost his wife, and his children were motherless; Schönleben's youngest child had also been murdered. These graves could not be reopened; but these sorrows might to some extent be lightened, and the simple good-natured Nürnbergers did their best to make the sufferers forget what was in truth unforgetable. Mau MEPHITIS AND THE ANTIDOTE. AFTER a day spent by woods and waters, on the heather or the green turf, there is a faint sensation of the odious in re-entering a town--even in treading a turnpike road. The sunny days of an autumn recess only deepen the contrast between the healthy freshness of nature and the insalubrity that mankind bring about them wherever they are densely congregated not merely in the unpaved lane or narrow court where poor people live all the year round, but also in the squares and crescents where all is done that the habits and the sanitary science of the day suggest to mitigate the offence. The recollection of the fetid dust on the hot stones which drove us away in August, revives when we return in November, and adds to whatever reality there may be in the comparative impurity of town air. But of all the reminiscences of this kind, what can ever have been so potent, "infandum revocare dolorem," as the return of the British Legislature to the banks of the Thames must be? Whether oblivious or not to the cry of other sufferers wailing for sanitary reform and the removal of noxious nuisances, they did at last fairly catch it themselves, and an exulting public said, Take that, and remember. No doubt they will remember. The duty of the Legislator was never so brought home to him before. He had just built for himself his "lordly pleasure-house," "and in the towers he placed great bells that swung," and might have asked, like the Queen of the palace of art, "Who shall gaze upon my palace with unblinded eyes," when behold a curse more dire than hers, even when "On corpses three months old at noon she came, That stood against the wall"comes down upon his grandeur, and envelopes it in filth and stench. So terrible a combination of pestiferous gases had the machinations of the sanitarians rolled down upon the Houses of Parliament, that Cockneydom might have fairly expected some unconscious person to accomplish at last their proverbial impossibility of setting the Thames on fire, and to behold their favourite river glittering like a petroleum lake with little lambent flames catching its escaping gases. Indeed, among the multitudinous projects for disposing usefully, properly, ornamentally, and agreeably, of the impurities of our great cities, it is surprising that some one has not proposed to supersede coal-gas by a judicious extraction and condensation of the rich sulphuretted hydrogen which they are ceaselessly generating. Paradoxical as it may seem, this climax of all known nuisances can be attributed to nothing else but the rapid progress of sanitary organisation. It is a lesson on half measures. The organisation has been more energetic than complete. It has pushed its material up to a certain point, and left it there. The wondrous organisation by which Napoleon conveyed so many men into Russia, made the fate of his army all the more disastrous, since it did not extend to carrying them back again; and so of the organisation of our sanitary reformers, which takes the filth of London into the Thames, but does not carry it out again. To understand the matter fully, let us cast a thought backwards. The removal of impurities by hydraulic gravitation is an invention of late times, like gaslight and steamengines. People who live in wellconditioned houses wonder how their forefathers could have lived without modern improvements; but they did live, and enjoyed life, and were not entirely destitute of purity, either in body or mind. There were probably many places in their time having an evil odour, and the removal of the impurities of London must have been a nasty business, as we may see in some of Hogarth's prints, especially in his "Night and Morning." A friendly shower was often a great relief; and as it did not then descend into the cavernous recesses of sewers, it swept the streets like a mountain torrent. "How it gushes and struggles out, And swift and wide, Like a river down the gutter roars Such a working off of superficial impurities would naturally dirty the edge of the river for a time, and it VOL. LXXXV.-NO. DXX. doubtless received a continual supply from Fleet ditch and other exits. But these would be but a driblet compared to that mighty volume of waters; and in the days when aldermen had a stout preference for Thames salmon-a natural production which sounds as obsolete as the ichthyosaurus greatly preferring it with its fresh flavour to the boiled commodity from Scotland, the Thames was perhaps a pellucid and nearly a pure stream. Of the filth which was not then carried away by the river, perhaps a considerable percentage remained in the shape of a permanent nuisance. But the great bulk of it must have been removed somehow, and applied to innocuous and useful purposes. It may, indeed, be counted one of the wise adjustments of Providence for the preservation of organic life, that all decaying and putrifying animal or vegetable matter torments us by its odours until it is applied to that only purpose which removes its offensiveness the replacement of new forms of organic life; until-to speak more briefly and practicallyit is employed in agriculture. All filthy and offensive things are applicable to this purpose; it is the only purpose that removes their offensiveness; and they continue their attacks onthat department of human sensation which is most immediately susceptible to their influence-the olfactory nerves-until they are hidden out of sight in the earth, and placed in a position to carry on their proper function of reproduction, through which they come forth in the broad fields of corn, or the sweet-scented flowers that greet us when we step abroad in the early summer mornings. Thus, even in the filthiest places, there is generally but a per-centage of the actual putrifying organic them the great bulk being, as it matter which has been created in were, by a natural law, removed to perform its legitimate function in the soil. Let us now see what immediate effect the injunctions of the school of sanitary reformers were calculated to have on such general conditions. Their chief injunctions may P be thus briefly set forth:-Bring fresh water in great abundance into the towns, and lay it down, not only for street purposes, but in all the houses. Let it be so abundant that it is kept at all times at high pressure; there is no occasion for the tank or the cistern which renders the water stale and subjects it to pollution. As there comes from an affluent river, or some large reservoir, a great aqueduct full of water into the town, which divides itself into main-pipes along the chief streets, which then in their turn, by one or more processes of subdivision, send a small tube full of water on high pressure, perpetually running, or ready to run, into every house ;-so let the water, carrying with it the impurities of the house, pass outwards and join a street pipe, which joins a larger pipe or sewer, and this again a larger, till the whole accumulated filth rolls onwards in one volume. The adjust ment is like that of the venous and arterial system in the circulation of the blood inversed. In practically carrying out plans, of which this arrangement may be called the general theory or system, a number of inveterate practices had to be attacked. Fierce war was made on cesspools; they were shown to be deposits of gaseous poison, generated by an interruption in the current of the liquid sewage away from the neighbourhood of human dwellings, for which no purpose could be assigned. The size and structure of the ordinary sewers under streets were next attacked. The section of a London sewer in operation was drawn, and explained to be a large stone vault, in which meandered a stream between banks of solidified filth which it had left in its current as mountain-streams deposit sand and pebbles by their side a magazine of putrescence, ramifying itself through the city, distributing foul gases at every outlet and inlet. An unfortunate engineer, questioned as to what would become of a dead cat or a cabbage in one of his sewers, unwittingly said that it wald rot there and gradually move h the rest of the matter in -the very answer his ques tioners wanted; so that he had the satisfaction to see it paraded as an illustration of the pestilent character of the sewers he had been constructing. The remedy for this defect was in the well-known system of tubular drainage or sewerage-the ducts larger or smaller, according to occasion, but always tubular, circular, or oval-smooth-surfaced, and free from all asperities and angularities, in such wise, that, as one of the professional promoters of the arrangement puts it-"So readily does the smooth interior surface of the glazed stoneware pipes allow the passage of the sewage, and so securely do these pipes retain the flush of cold water that drives it from the houses, that no time is afforded for the process of decomposition, and the foul gases scarcely begin to dissolve before the deposit in the housedrains reaches its destination at the terminus of the main sewer."r."-(Report, p. 23.) Thus, said the sanitarians, the pure water passes into the city-combines with all uncleanness, and passes out with it. Nothing is left to putrify or escape in gases; the whole is carried away, and that speedily. But whither is it carried? There was the rub. There has been abundant promulgation from the sanitary school of projects for the ultimate disposal of the organic refuse, which, down to the point we have now come to, is passing through a great trunksewer; but, as it happens, the practical world has got no farther through the organisation than to the mouth of the great trunk - sewer, where it stops-though the contents of the trunk - sewer do not stop there. From the beginning, sanitary reformers have kept an eye on the cold clay and gravel lands which starve for want of the decomposing organic matter that festers in the neighbouring towns. They have found, and applied with much skill to their object, a very unpropitious-looking instance of the disposal of town-refuse near Edinburgh. A practice had gradually arisen of some owners or tenants of meadow-land between the city and the sea drawing off a part of the contents of a passing sewer for the enrichment of their land. The operation was at first so small that it attracted neither alarm nor notice, and it increased so imperceptibly, but at the same time so substantially, that when people's feeling was excited against it, those interested in its maintenance insisted that they had a long prescriptive right to it; that it was established property worth at least £150,000, the amount which they named as their proper compensation if they were to abandon it. Finally, they got clauses inserted in the Edinburgh police acts, prohibiting the refuse of the town from being diverted through other channels away from their property; the first time surely in the history of the world in which any community have been prohibited from doing as they pleased with their own refuse, and compelled carefully to preserve it, no matter how offensive to them, for the use of a favoured recipient. As the citizens of Edinburgh know too well, the offensive fluid is employed in the irrigation of grazing meadows. The adepts have calculated that, if the whole instead of only a portion of the drainage of Edinburgh were thus employed, it would create a rental of from £15,000 to £20,000 a-year. What a Pactolus, therefore, might not the drainage of London prove! No one has been hardy enough, however, specifically to advocate the irrigation of the flats of Kent and Surrey after the fashion of these Edinburgh meadows. These have, indeed, been chiefly known by the bitter complaints against them as a public nuisance, and the efforts for their abolition. Still, they afforded an instance of town-refuse turned to valuable account, which the sanitarians were naturally unwilling utterly to abandon. It was maintained, and is probably true, that if in thus supplying manure by irrigation, or in the liquid form, you issue no more than precisely what the plants you desire to nourish can consume, there are no offensive exhalations from the process, and no deleterious effects on the animal economy. Still, as the matter at present stands, there is a general and not unnatural prejudice against the distribution here and there throughout the open country of the detested compound. It may not be smelt-it may not be deleterious to health-but that it is there, would destroy the amenity of the beanridge and the clover-field; nor, although roses and other sweetest flowers are the greediest of nurture, and, indeed, foul feeders, would the florist willingly gratify their greed from such a source. It is scarcely possible to convey to those who have not dipped into the parliamentary papers and other receptacles in which the greater part of our sanitary literature is hidden, a conception of the quantity of acute inquiry and ingenious experiment which has been devoted to this problem-the utilisation of sewage on the land. It has been maintained, and apparently on good experimental authority, that the most efficacious means of applying its fertilising elements to plants, is by passing it to them under the soil, and directly feeding the mouths of their roots. On this ground, some people have dreamt of, rather than projected, a reticulation of slender ducts conveying the nourishment to plants without its appearing above the earth and giving offence either to smell or sight. The idea which the possible realisation of such a process presents is the very romance of sanitary economy. The element from some pellucid river or mountain-lake, or from the aggregate supply of many rocky springs, is poured in all its original purity into some great city, Then it waits until it has performed the refreshing and purifying functions. to which it is destined. These accomplished, it speeds on its secret way, hiding itself and the contamination which its beneficent functions have entailed on it, until it arises out of the earth in the fertility of the harvest-field and the blossom of the flower. Such hidden metamorphoses may come to pass in the course of nature's operations, but they are too perfect for the mechanism of man. Even the all-potent Metropolitan Board of Works will not undertake to do the job before |