THE SEWAGE DIFFICULTY.

Lyttelton Times, Volume XLIV, Issue 4618, 2 December 1875, Page 3

THE SEWAGE DIFFICULTY.

TO THB KDITOE OB THE LYTTELTON TIMES. Sib, —It may be safely asserted that the disposal of sewage is the most important problem for the well-being of towns, great or small; and in a new Country it is most desirable that clear views should prevail as to the arrangements which, from the .first, must be kept in view and provided for, so as to secure this indispensable requisite for the public health and prosperity. Ho doftbt a town might easily be imagined to be a living animal, its Municipality being the brain, having its system of nerves, its ramifications of arteries and veins, feeding itself through its thousands of mouths, with its system of digestion, circulation, respiration, and other vital functions; but denied the power of locomotion. Man undertakes the creation of such a being as I have described, but if he neglects to provide the indispensable arrangements for the disposal of the refuse or excreta of the animal, how can it possibly exist without becoming a hideous monster of disease and deformity, a nuisance on the face of the earth P

We are lucky in that the birth and growth of our towns is taking place in an age when the light of science is being directed to sewage arrangements, and I trust that I may not be occupying your space unprofitably in drawing the attention of your readers to one of the latest utterances of competent men on the subject. On August 27, 1874, a Commission \gas appointed to investigate the question of the disposal of the refuse of a very aged and notorious destructive monster, the city of Paris. The condition of this poor monster is described as " incredibly nasty.” The picture drawn by them leaves little, if anything, to the imagination, and nothing to be desired. Chained up on the banks of the Seine by its ignorant masters, nothing hitherto heard or read of can apparently bo more insufferably disgusting than the filth it disgorges into that river. Five or six schemes for remedying this sad state of things were carefully examined by this Commission, and at last they arrived at the gratifying conclusion that filth is merely a product of ignorance, that it is a name invented by the ignorant for “ useful matter in a wrong place;” and that the simple and beautiful arrangements of the Creator of all things had provided a ready means of converting a deadly nuisance into a blessing. The solution of the mystery is to be sought in tho combined action of the soil and of plants, in profitably utilising the constituents of sewage. Having been one of the originators of the Boyal Agricultural College at Cirencester, I remember that our first appointed chemist at that Institution—Mr Thomas Way—showed us, about a quarter of a century ago, that if he passed the most filthy sewage through a certain depth of soil, it beoame thereby deodorised and clear. The same experiment was performed by the French Commissioners : —" A glass vessel, half-a-metre high, filled with earth and sand from the plain of Gennevilliers,. clarified, for a long period, sewage discharged on its surface.” The Commission analysed the sewage with which they had to deal, and tho variety of plants which they proposed to cultivate by irrigation, and arrived at the conclusion that for each crop 7800 cubic feet of sewage, or say 1,306,000 gallons, might bayippliod per acre. Our own countryman, Mr BaUey Denton, bad, 1 believe, the merit of first reducing to a system the method of “ downward filtration,” or filtration by gravity through a depth of porous soil. I had the pleasure of inspecting the sewage farm at Barking, for which Mr Hemana and my son, Mr Selby Tanored, were the engineers, where I saw an acre of strawberries with ripe fruit nearly as large as wineglasses hanging in tempting on clean straw; Italian rye-grass of gigantic growth for the production of butter and milk by scores of cows standing in clean sweet stalls, besides enormous root crops and other produce of the farm or market garden, shewing tho wonderful conversion of the foulest refuse of towns iuto objects of utility, sweetness, and beauty. To put to shame the careless ignorance of the age, I once perpetrated an “ Agricultural Caricature," representing a fine ship, after navigating thousands of miles of ocean, loaded with the dung of birds from Peru, stranded on her arrival at a harbour’s mouth, which had been choked up by town sewage, equally valuable with the guano which she had been so far to fetch to our shores! The practical application of the above to our case seems clear enough. In choosing the sites of onr towns we must be careful to provide reserves of porous soil, to which sewage can flow by its own gravity. Hitherto the main object seems to have been to place a town near a running stream of water. As long as the future town consists of only a few scattered bouses this may be a convenience, but it is sure to lead to difficulties very shortly. On the contrary, the town site should be on a slight eminence, to which a water supply must be conducted by artificial means, and the steep gradients from tho sea to the mountains in our case would generally render this a matter of little difijeuh” The consent of some efficient Boar j or authority should be necessary before any township should be permitted to be laid out in lots, otherwise we shall be perpetually running into. mistakes and difficulties, involving sacrifice of human life and health, heavy expenses, and unsatisfactory attempts at a remedy, all which a little foresight might have obviated. Private individuals must not be allowed to create public nuisances, nests of fever and pestilence, by selling or letting land for building purposes unless some competent authority has inspected the site and given a certificate of its suitableness. Prevention is much cheaper and better than cure. Tour obedient servant, Nov. 27. THOMAS TANORED.