two plans was very great; the central tunnel
scheme requiring something like thirty-six
pounds the lineal yard to carry it out; and the
side tunnel scheme being estimated to cost only
fifteen pounds for each lineal yard. As the
latter plan had two tunnels to construct in
place of one, the great difference in cost must
have arisen, if the calculations were correct, in
the great area which the central tunnel projector
proposed to build over with vaults. Many of the
schemes exhibited were enlivened with pictures of
the father of a family going down under the road-
way in front of his house to see that the gas and
water pipes were in proper order, and that no
one had run away with the main sewer. A
little more fancy on the part of the draughtsmen
might have represented whole parties of
visitors inspecting the underground labyrinth,
as they would a conservatory at an evening
party. Both the prize plans were regarded as
very ornamental and excellent as pictures, but
too expensive for practical application. The
short central tunnel in King-street, Covent-garden
—a pure experiment on the part of the Board
of Works, undertaken, perhaps, to silence
theorists—may appear to have been copied from the
first plan; but, copied or not, it will probably
be the only piece of fancy sub-way that London
will see during the present century. The
huddling together of gas and water pipes and
telegraphic wires on each side of the New Road,
to make room for the Metropolitan Railway, is
some approximation to the second plan, though
very hurriedly and rudely carried out.

If we feel disposed to examine the scientific-
theoretical way of looking at sewers, there is no
lack of material, and we may be at once
surrounded by almost as many "doctors" as we
should find at a meeting held to denounce the
Bank Charter. It is a peculiarity of theorists
upon sewers and drainage that they nearly all
pull in different directions. Their name is
legion, but we should find it difficult to gather
half a dozen of them together who would agree
upon any consistent scheme of drainage. The
two great plans that have occupied public
attention for many years have been the purification
of the Thames and the utilisation of London
sewage. It is easy to talk about a noble river being
made the flowing cesspool of some three hundred
and sixty-three thousand inhabited houses
(according to the census of 1861) and of some two
million eight hundred thousand inhabitants. It
is easy to talk largely of fourteen millions of
cubic feet, or ninety millions of gallons of
sewage washed away every day through costly
sub-ways by two hundred millions of gallons of
rainfall, when it contains a daily fertilising value
of three hundred and sixty pounds sterling, or
a sum that would reach more than a million
sterling by the end of a year. It is this muddy
stream, trickling from innumerable house-tops,
rushing down thousands of gullies, oozing
through beds of gravel, draining off marshy
meadows and ploughed land, or flowing from
thousands of dwellings, that helps to wash out
the hundreds of downward sewers and their
miles of tributary channels. This process of
washing scatters and dilutes the valuable
elements of fertility, until they are said to be lost
beyond all hone of recovery. Men of science,
capitalists, and social reformers, have consumed
many years and much money in trying to restore
this lost mass of valuable sewage to the hungry
land; but nothing practical and remunerative,
in a commercial sense, has ever been put
before the public in this connexion. We have
been taunted with the superior wisdom of the
despised Chinese, who have no elaborate
underground sewage system, and who, instead
of carrying away their floods of sewage wealth
into the sea, by tunnels built at the cost of
millions of money, gather it every morning
by public servants with more regularity than
our dust is called for by the contractors,
and take it away to nourish agriculture. Our
reply to this taunt is, that people (adopting the
vulgar superstition) who are as numerous as
ants, and who have to live in boats because the
land is too crowded to hold them with any
comfort, must be often at their wits' end to procure
food, and are, therefore, no models for a well-to-do
civilised nation.

The two chief plans put forward about thirteen
or fourteen years ago to secure the sewage refuse
as manure were both carried so far as to form
two public companies, with acts of parliament.
The plan of one company was to collect the
contents of some of the Westminster and Pimlico
sewers, and convey them by a deep underground
channel to Hammersmith, where a steam-engine
and other machinery were to distribute the
manure in a liquid state to the market-gardens
of that neighbourhood. The plan of the other
company was to collect the contents of three
main sewers falling into the Thames between
Vauxhall-bridge and Westminster-bridge, and,
after allowing the liquid part to flow into the
Thames, to deprive the refuse of its offensive
smell, and sell it as manure in a solid state.
Both these projects fell through from their
presumed commercial impracticability; but numberless
plans and suggestions have, at different
times, been brought before government commissions,
the old Commissioners of Sewers, the
present Metropolitan Board of Works, and the City
Commissioners of Sewers. Even no further
back than 1857, when the great intercepting
scheme of the Metropolitan Board of Works,
which is now in rapid progress towards completion,
was under discussion, about one hundred
and forty different plans were sent in by well-
meaning amateurs, competent engineers, and
persons interested in the great sewage question.
Some of these proposals naturally bore the well-
known trade mark of Laputa, while others
were almost practical in all their details not
quite. Without any wish to speak disrespectfully
of sewage, I have a secret sympathy with
old Sir Thomas Browne's feeling, and regard
this daily mass as a melancholy adjunct of
our fallen state. Sewage, whether fluid or
solid, mixed or unmixed, is very much like our
convicts; everybody wants to get rid of it, and