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Now that it contains water in place of sewage, there is a guarantee that its main element as a natural amenity in a great city will be maintained, and as it becomes purer, so will the facilities which it offers for boating, fishing, and bathing increase. But it should not be embanked beyond the present limit at Putney. Stone walls are not a thing of beauty, and a natural river-bank is.
The sewage question is taken up mainly with reference to the health of towns, but it deserves consideration in another aspect its influence upon the production of food in the nation. An exhaustive process upon the fertility of the globe has been set on foot.
Writing on a July day from his office in Whitehall, he says, after speaking of the heat of the weather, "Time has often been compared to a river: if the Thames at London represent the stream of traditional wisdom, the comparison will indeed be of an ill odor; the accumulated wisdom of the past will be proved upon analogy to be as it were the collected sewage of the centuries; and the great problem, how to get rid of it."
As to posterity, who would consent to have a month's fit of the gout or tic-douloureux in order that in the fourth thousand year, A. D., posterity should enjoy a perfect system of sewage?" Sir Peter, who had recently been afflicted by a very sharp attack of neuralgia, shook his head, but was too conscientious not to keep silence.
With all these things taken into account, stocking only with the best food varieties, if a state has laws which require that a stream be kept free from sewage and refuse, that no tiny fish be taken from the water, and that only a stated number can be taken in a day by a single person, hundreds of small streams, ponds and reservoirs all over the country may be made to yield food supplies for the entire community near by.
The sewage water comes down, but it passes into the filtering bed, and is disinfected and cleansed before it is permitted to flow over our fields.
His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground.
Time was I remember it well when a member of Parliament who knew that there was any place where a lady could get something to eat was pointed to as a Parliamentary marvel, who knew his way about in an uncanny fashion; when the room in which a lady could dine had been seen by but few eyes and, indeed, was little better than a coalhole, low-roofed, dimly lit, buried in dark and deep recesses of an underworld of the House of Commons, as little known to the general member as the sewage catacombs of London to the ordinary citizen.
So typhoid must be fought not only by vaccination, but by legislation insuring a pure water supply, proper sewage disposal, and the protection of food from contamination.
All the gutters having sufficient descent to lead the sewage rapidly forward, it is usual to set a dam near the far end of the gutter, and allow the sewage to overflow and run down over the surface until it has reached as far as the formation of the ground and the quantity of the liquid will allow it to spread.
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