THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9241, 19 December 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1888.

It is a subject for congratulation that our municipal authorities have at last been able to enter into an arrangement, according to which the city is to have its refuse harmlessly removed, while the country will obtain the best of manures in a convenient and inoffensive form. Ever since Liebig's discourses thereupon aroused public impatience of our old-fashioned devices for getting rid of town refuseas at once dangerous to health and wasteful of what might be turned to valuable account scientific ingenuity has been busy with experiments to deal with the difficulty. Simple facts are often overlooked or forgotten, just because of their simplicity, and a Dorsetshire vicar, the Rev. Mr. Moule, really led the way by recalling attention to the power of earth as a deodoriser—a fact of which even the inferior animal," show an instinctive sense, and the use of which was prescribed in the ordinances oi some ancient nations. But it was soon discovered that earth, however efficacious a deodoriser for the service of a house or even a village, would not equally answer if employed on a great scale, as in the case of a townas then rendering more clumsy the work of removal. The thing was imperfect, but it was a step in the right direction, and made plain what was wantednamely, a deodoriser more potent and more portable than mere dry loam could be if required for this service on an extensive scale. It was evident that chemistry, with its remarkable advance in our day, could not but soon supply what was needed, meet the difficulty in some practical shape. At the present moment in many countries the experimentalists are at work. Thus, at the meeting the other day of the City Council to have something done in this matter of refuse removal, of the two proposals which were submitted for their consideration and choice, one, it was stated, was a French and the other an American invention. We trust that the decision arrived at by the municipal body may have satisfactory results both from the sanitary and economic points of viewmay answer the purpose both of town and country, of citizen and farmer, each having such a keen interest in the question. Of course improvements in this way are the more easily effected before a ] city grows too big, because then other modes of removing the refuse have been already expensively laid down, and there are many additional obstacles to organising a change. In this era of monster cities, agriculture may be said to have acquired a new interest and a new demand. It is epigramatically expressed in the saying that if the country feeds the town, the town in return should sustain the fertility of the country. Liebig did good service in drawing attention to the fact that the sewers of ancient Rome swallowed up the fertility of the opposite coasts of Barbary. Since he so wrote, some forty years ago, many cities mighty as ancient Rome, in at least size and the number of inhabitants, have sprung up over Europe and America. Look at the long list of towns that within twenty years have doubled and even quadrupled their population. The new facilities of commerce, enhanced by particular local circumstances, have done it. Look at the sudden uprise or swelling out in our time of Swansea or Bradford in England, of Antwerp or Hamburg on the Continent, of Melbourne or Sydney in Australia, and in America of Chicago and the various huge prairie cities which still bear the names hastily given them the other day by the hunter or trapper. These are only among the prominent examples of the extraordinary civic growth characteristic of the period. There are a hundred or more such monster commercial centres, not to speak of the great historical capitals, headed by London with five millions of inhabitants, civic and suburban. or as many people as all England held A.D. 1700, just before Queen Anne ascended the throne. Terrible indeed it would be if cities nowadays were to continue to do as ancient Rome did, in devouring the fertility of the country and not restoring it. When Sir Robert Peel, in order to obtain information about tea culture, then being introduced in India, commissioned Mr. Fortune to make inquiries in China, that gentleman brought back much other curious and important information about the husbandry of the Chinese, always a notable agricultural people. He found the rivers and canals with which the country is crossed, everywhere traversed by flotillas of great boats, distributing manure supplied by the towns. He learned that the practice had prevailed from time immemorial, and in the provinces he visited he found the soil, cultivated from a date as far back as that of the Egyptian Pharaohs, in the highest state of productiveness, and probably most of it richer than it was originally. The mode of transfer, however, was too careless to suit European ideas, but it would be odd if our scientific invention could not amend that drawback. There has been more delay than was to be anticipated in fully effecting this, but it seems to be at last accomplished, and the refuse, with its valuable properties concentrated, is transformed, freed from all offensiveness, into a poudrette, which is so highly prized by agriculturists that the removal of its refuse, heretofore burdensome to a city, may eventually become a source of revenue. In new countries agriculture never received so much attention as it does now ; and this is called for, because it is an old remark about settlers in most new countries that they are careless farmers, taking the good out of the soil, without restoring the constituents of fertility. In the United States they say that an immense amount of harm has been done in this way. And the same complaint has been always heard in Australia, where there is far less opportunity for

careless farming, because good land i, there the exception, not the rule because facilities of occupation hav? been more circumscribed than ;' America. _ In New Zealand, or at an!! rate at this end of the colony, them i now unmistakably the unanimous an,) strenuous public opinion that it is in the settlement and cultivation of ft, land a reliable basis of public iJ, perity must be looked for. We ° glad that, all the more seasonably therefore, our municipal authorities J„ their way for the conversion of th town refuse to agricultural service in stead of continuing to annoy suburb™ residents where it is cast loose, or con tinuing to be carried through sewers t<i the damage of the harbour, or to hp employed in making sandbanks and poisoning fishing grounds bv bom'! carried out in boatloads to the. Haunti Gulf, as somebody has wildly s !,„ gested. J hU °-