has confirmed him in the necessity of applying
sewage to land, but modified his original views
of its value. Mr. Rawlinson is part proprietor
of a small estate at Worthing, purchased for the
express purpose of irrigation by sewage on the
same plan as at Croydon—viz. open channels
and surface application. He says: "At
Worthing they act with wisdom; they charge
nothing for the sewage. If they had charged
anything, there would have been no experiment.
They not only give the sewage, but lift it on
the land." We are going to put the sewage of
two thousand people on forty-two acres. "I
do not approve of the method of passing
sewage through small pipes and applying it by
hose and jet. You cannot make sewage pay in
that way. If I had to do with the sewage of
London, I should try to get it on an area
of about thirty thousand acres. To distribute
it over four times that area would cost sixteen
times as much, both for distribution and
management."

Sir Joseph Paxton is a specimen of the most
intelligent class of agriculturists and cultivators.
His practical evidence agrees entirely with that
of the agricultural chemists. He says: "I
consider sewage a great rough sort of business;
you cannot put it into nice forms and ways. I
should like very much to apply small dressings
to land by hose and jet, so as to just wet the
roots of plants, if you can show me how to do
it, but I have not the slightest notion that you
will ever get the system applied to the extent
that would be necessary for disposing of the
sewage of London. According to my calculations,
the excreta of two hundred and fifty
persons can be placed on an acre of ground, so
it would take about thirty thousand acres of
land to extract all the absolute growth out of
the sewage of the three million inhabitants of
the metropolis. According to a rough guess,
you have something like forty gallons of water
to each inhabitant per day. Now, forty gallons
would not be very strongly impregnated with
matter which would largely develop plants.
On the other hand, water alone, if you could
get it on the land, would, at certain times when
wanted, be worth one penny to twopence a
ton. Sandy soil is the best, a soil that will
allow a very large quantity to pass through
it without artificial drainage. On sand in
proper weather you can hardly apply too
much sewage to vegetation; in clay lands
it is otherwise, because it cannot pass
off."

Mr. Christie Miller, the fortunate proprietor
of the Craigentemy meadows, with nearly forty
years' experience, gives evidence which in every
particular squares with Sir Joseph Paxton's
opinions. He says, that while the results of
the application of sewage to grass recently
mowed in hot weather are perfectly
marvellous, producing a visible growth in
forty-eight hours, he is satisfied that it is not
likely to be beneficial to wheat or turnips,
under ordinary circumstances. "Water
streamed upon arable land makes furrows
and channels, and washes the roots of wheat
and turnips bare."

The agricultural chemists—for instance,
Professors Way and Voelcker—agree entirely with
the agriculturists. They recommend as most
profitable the application of large quantities of
liquid sewage to sandy or self-drained soils, and
to grass crops, because they can take a profit by
manure almost all the year round. Professor
Way says: "I can make sand by the application
of sewage water richer in clay every year,
but I could never get a clay soil open enough to
receive sewage." Both these eminent chemists
treat with ridicule the enormous value put
upon the sewage of London in parochial and
City of London corporation discussions, and by
the celebrated Professor Liebig. They agree
that, theoretically, if something that is quite
impossible to do could be done—that is, if the
manurial ingredients contained in the sewage of
London could be dried and exhausted—the
value would be about twopence per ton, but
"when you have the ingredients analysed,
you have by no means arrived at the value
of the sewage practically for farming
purposes." Thus, although the solid matter in
a ton of liquid manure is worth, theoretically,
twopence a ton, the liquid manure is not
worth nearly so much, because the solid
matter is mixed up with a large quantity of
water, which, during the greater part of the
year, in our climate is surplusage, if not
positively injurious to the most profitable crops of
a farm.

The value of sewage for dairy purposes has
been shown in a very striking manner by the
experiments of Mr. J. B. Lawes, as one of the
Royal Commission on the subject. He found
that while an acre of grass unmanured kept a
cow twenty weeks, producing milk worth eleven
pounds, fifteen hundred tons of sewage made an
acre worth eighteen pounds fourteen shillings,
three thousand tons, twenty-six pounds eighteen
shillings, and four thousand tons, thirty-one
pounds eleven shillings. Yet there are people
stupid enough to believe that Mr. Lawes, who has
spent in the last twenty years more than twenty
thousand pounds in agricultural experiments, is
opposed to the utilisation of sewage. With the
preceding evidence before them, it is not
extraordinary that the Metropolitan Board rejected
the scheme of a person who, like Rip van
Winkle, seems to have slept away all the period
of experience between the time when Smith of
Deanston dreamed his dreams of millions of
revenue from town sewage, and when Croydon
turned its liquid refuse to agricultural use,
and Mr. Robert Rawlinson matured his plans
for irrigating meadows with the contents of
the sewers of Worthing, rejected a scheme
for pumping back the sewage collected at
Barking, to Hampstead or Harrow and Shooter's
Hills, and thence retailing it at twopence a
ton over half a million acres, to be netted
with iron pipes and irrigated by hose and jet,
a class of clay-land farmers who have always,
and wisely, rejected the use of liquid manure