Untitled

Manawatu Times, Volume LXIV, Issue 281, 5 December 1907, Page 4

It would be well if the people of Palmerston would follow the example of their councillors and visit the septic tank. They would see there a remarkable example of what science can do in the handling of sewage. Not so very long ago the sanitation of inland towns presented a very serious problem to which the best 'solution available was the sewage farm, where the liquid sewage was used as an irrigant for crops of lucerne and the like. The sewage farm served its purpose better than other systems of dealing with the waste of cities. It was far preferable to the pollution of rivers and streams, to the typhoid epidemics of some laxer methods, and even to tlie harbor pollution of the primitive drainage of the coast towns. But the septic tank proceeds on totally different lines. The odors of the sewage farm and the river pollution of the direct method are alike eliminated, and though much still remains to be learned in regard to it, even,

ro far as it has gone it presents an extraordinary object lesson of what nature, assisted by man, can accomplish. The old sewage farm method trusted to vegetation to absorb much that was otherwise offensive, and to what was then imagined to be atmospheric action. The septic tank recognises that it is to bacteriological activity, to the organised work of living organisms, that we must look for results, and merely seeks to establish the best possible conditions for the nourishment of friendly bacteria, and to assist them in their baneficent work. Thus there are the bacteria which breed in the deep gloom beneath a solid "mat" and are eternally at work disintegrating sewage solids. Having broken these up there come in another set of microbes who handle the disintegrated material, and these work best in the light and the sun and for their behoof the effort is to thoroughly distribute the material and secure movement without such current as would not give them time for doing their work thoroughly. Then there are the other sets of bacteria whose digestions permit of them assimilating the attenuated materials left over after the chemical and organic transformations wrought by the advance guards of the bacterial army. For these there are the shallow trays and the shallow channels aerating and sunning the effluent before it drips in to the shingle filter-bed for the final processes. And the very latest discovery, made at Nottingham, is that the process is improved by constructing the filter-beds in steps of gradually increasing depths, because even here the different depths, lights, and conditions of the now clear as water effluent are characterised by differing varieties of microbe, each doing its specifio share of the work and degenerating into the spore condition if it is given work to do outside its union log. In fact in the bacterial world there is the most rigid division of labor, and. the most absolute specialisation ever dreamed of by labor organiser or "captain of industry."