mated, for the whole value of the sewage of towns, when it has to be carried any distance, depends upon the cost of distribution, especially in those cases where there is a necessity for pumping, in order to raise it to a high level, that it may flow by its own gravity to distant parts. It must be evident that to distribute superfluous water is to clog the experiment with destructive charges. How to get rid of this superfluous water, which so deteriorates the value of town sewage, is the great question of the day. Sir Joseph Paxton, in his valuable evidence, believes the time will come when every house will have its hermetically sealed tank, into which all the sewage proper of the house will flow. This tank he would ventilate by carrying an half-inch pipe from it up the chimney. That by this means all the unpleasant odour would be got rid of, he proves by the fact, new perhaps to our readers, that in this manner, all the sewage of the Crystal Palace now deposited in tanks at the ends of the south transepts is ventilated through the pillars of the building, without the slightest odour being discovered, whilst the splendid bloom of the geraniums is the result of the sewage itself. As to the method of emptying these house-sewage tanks, he says:
I can see a time, and I believe I could scheme it, if I could turn my entire attention to it, by which you would have in your cellar a glazed iron tank, and a small half-inch pipe running up the chimney for the ventilation of this tank; and you would have a pipe going to the outside with a top screwed on, and a locomotive engine with a large tank would go down your street, and they would hook on this, and they would draw out in three minutes all that you had got in the tank, without your even knowing anything about it, or having the slightest possible smell in the house.
With all due deference to Sir Joseph Paxton, we think it will be a very distant day before we shall scent his odorous locomotive at our doors, for the simple reason, that to employ a pump at every door, whilst one pump in the suburbs would answer every purpose, would be economically absurd. Sir Joseph, however, was right in recognising the fact that we are destroying the sewage of our great towns by mixing it in our underground culverts with the rainfall.
To one of the members of the late Commission of Sewers the credit is principally due of pointing out this initial error, whilst battling manfully against Mr. Bazalgette’s monstrous sewers, so constructed as to swamp the excreta of the town in the drainage of the rainfall of metropolitan area, which extends over fifty-nine and a half square miles, and pours into the sewers from 80,000,000 to 90,000,000 of tons of water annually—a scheme which threatens to starve the river, and undoubtedly spoils the excreta of 3,000,000 of people. As far as we can see, there can be no denying the truth of his formula—
The whole of the rainfall is due to the river, the whole of the sewage to the soil.[1]
This proposition he proposed to carry out by maintaining the then existing sewers for their original purpose, the carrying off the surface drainage to the river; whilst the pipe water, enriched by the cleansing of our dwellings, he would collect in pipes, carry out of town, and apply to the land. The millions that have been spent in constructing the colossal system of drainage now being carried out in the metropolis may seem to preclude the construction of this double system, and to destroy the possibility of saving the untold wealth it is planned to throw into the sea; but it is just possible that the metropolitan sewage may be intercepted at the mouth of each house drain, and carried, by means of earthenware pipes, through the great drains themselves. The house sewage and the refuse surface water flowing, like the vein and the artery in the human body, in the same enveloping sheath,—the one to afford splendid crops from exhausted fields, the other to supply a full flow to the Thames.
At all events, if such a scheme is impossible of accomplishment, we trust that the much-vaunted metropolitan drainage scheme will serve as an example to be avoided, rather than followed, by other towns, now that the value of sewage, not too much diluted, is placed beyond all dispute.
It certainly does seem extraordinary that in England, where economy of carriage is so well understood, that persons should fall into the fatal mistake of carrying that which can be made to carry itself. Thus, at Manchester, upwards of 100,000 tons of night-soil, mixed with 36,000 tons of ashes—the deodorising agent used in that town—are taken away annually by railroad into Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire, at a great expense, and in a very objectionable form, for this solid manure is for ever giving off its most valuable constituent, the ammonia. But why trouble the wheels of the locomotive, when an iron pipe, at a slight incline, will carry the sewage in a far less objectionable manner? Again, at Chatham, the farmers, notwithstanding their familiarity with the cheapness of hydraulic power, send to the town, and buy the night-soil of the contractors, which the latter carry for them in waggons. At Hyde, in Lancashire, a company is formed for conveying the sewage in a solid state, and has erected spacious premises for converting it into poudrette,—a process which nature has to undo before the manure is available for the use of the plant, as water is essential to carry it to the roots. A field, however thickly dressed with the best guano, whether home-made or Peruvian, can only obtain the advantage of it after a shower of rain, without which, indeed, the plants would be starved, just as a man would be in the best-stocked larder, provided he were chained by the leg out of reach of the tempting food hung around him.
These clumsy and needless methods of carrying and manufacturing an article which is already manufactured to hand in the best possible form, are not only conclusive of the ignorance which obtains with respect to the proper method of using it, but of its inherent worth. If town sewage can be made a paying commodity after thus being converted into a manufactured article, how much more profit could be made out of it by allowing it to flow immediately it is produced, when rich with all its volatile constituents, from our houses on to our fields.- ↑ “Purification of the Thames:” a Letter, by F. O. Ward Esq., addressed to William Coningham, M.P.
