912
SAWLINSON.
member of the Vienna Imperial Academy of Scienoes in place of the late Mr. Darwin.
EAWLINSON, Sib Robbet, C.B., civil engineer, born in Bristol, Feb. 28, 1810, son of Thomas Bawlinson, of Chorley, Lancashire, and Grace EUioe, of Exeter, Devonshire. Mr. Bawlinson's father being a mason and builder at Chorley, the son learned the practical part of the business there, and in 1831 Mr. Bawlinson entered under Jesse Hartley, C.E., the Liverpool Dock Engineer's office, and in 1836 passed on to the Blisworth Contract (Lon- don and Birmingham Railway), under Robert Stephenson, C.E. On the completion of this line of rail- way Mr. Bawlinson returned to Liverpool, and became assistant- surveyor to the corporation, re- maining up to the end of 1844; then for three years he was engi- neer to the Bridgwater Canal. In 1847 he devised a scheme to supply Liverpool with sixty million gal- lons of pure water per day, to be brought by an aqueauct from Bala Lake* and the district in North Wales, which project was, however, considered at the time too grand for the town. The late H. L. Elmes, architect of St. Cborge's HaU, Liver- pool, consulted Mr. Bawlinson as to that building, and having (1847), by the advice of his medical man, to visit a warmer climate, he, Mr. Elmes, left his friend, Mr. Rawlin- son, in charge of St. George's Hall. Mr. Elmes died, Nov. 26, 1847, at Kingston, Jamaica. Mr. Bawlinson then designed and executed the great hollow-brick arched ceiling, as also the main fioor, at St. C^rge's Hall — ^this work being new, difficult, and special, to suit Dr. Reid's mode of ventilation; subsequently the works were handed over to the late Mr. CockereU, who completed the building. In .the autumn of 1848 Mr. Rawlinson was appointed by the government of the day one of the first superintendent inspectors under the Public Health Act. In
I the spring of 1855 he was sent as Engineering Sanitary Commissioner ! to the BritiBh ;,Army in the East I (Dr. John Sutherland and Dr. Hec- I tor G^vin being the medical mem- bers). The commissioners landed at Constantinople, March 6, 1855, and at the harbour of Balaclava on April 3. Works were commenced immediately both at the great hos- pitals situate on the Bosphorus, and at the camp in the Crimea,, such as cleansing, ventilating, and furnish- ing a purer water. The returns from the four great hospitals on the Bosphorus, containing upwards of 4,000 sick British soldiers, showed, March 17, 1855, an average rate of mortality equal to ;8*61 per cent, per month of the sick, which mor- tality was reduced by June 30 of the same year to 1*01 per cent, per month. In the Crimea, during the winter (1854-55) previous to the advent of the Sanitary Commission, the losses in some regiments at the front had ranged for three months as high as seventy per cent., a mor- tality unexampled even in the worst of any former wars ; by the end of this summer (1855) the entire Brit- ish army in the Crimea was placed in a better state of health, and had a lower rate of mortality than it had ever experienced in biurracks at home; and this improvement con- tinued to the end of the war ; the mortality in the French army know- ing no such diminution, but on the contrary, increasing — 15,000 men perishing in their hospitals the last three months of the war. Under the supervision of sanitary commit- tees, established upon this Crimean pattern, the average mortality in the British army has, since 1858, been reduced about one-half, that is, from 17-5 per 1,000 to below 8*0 per 1,000 per annum. Waterworks, on the English plan, have been exe- cuted, imder Mr. Bawlinson's di- rections, for Hong Kong and Singa- pore. A great social question was entrusted to Mr. Rawlinson during the Cotton Famine, caused by the
