Peat-charcoal, which, we thus find to be an
article of no small prospective value to our
manufactures, is, perhaps, still more valuable,
certainly more universally to be appreciated,
when employed as an agent for the promotion
of the public health, and we shall have also
to speak of it as a manure.

We have mentioned Mr. Gwynne's patent
for the manufacture of peat fuel; we will
pause here to interpolate a brief notice of the
different kind of operation for the manufacture
of peat-charcoal, as it may now be
seen about twenty miles from Dublin, on
the Bog of Allen, where the Irish Amelioration
Society have established works. First,
as to the cutting of the bog; the outfall of
the drainage having been found, trenches are
cut, four feet wide and deep, parallel to each
other. The sides of these trenches, as they
deepen, are cut into steps or terraces, so that
you go down stairs from each side, as it were,
into each; this is to prevent the sides from
falling in. When the soil below the bog is
reached, the remnants of stair between the
trenches are also removed, and the cleared
soil is handed over to the farmer. The
superincumbent bog has been removed—the cheque
has been picked up, and cashed—and the virgin
soil on which it lay, as a witty writer has
expressed it, being tickled with the plough,
laughs with a harvest.

The process of cashing the cheque takes
place as follows. The wet blocks are piled
on wicker trays, dried partly by exposure to
the air, and then carried on peculiar little
wagons to the furnace. There they are
stacked against an air-chamber, and
completely dried. The mass, being finally ignited,
chars in a few hours, and the resulting charcoal
can be either used as fuel, or granulated
like coarse gunpowder for sanitary or
agricultural purposes. By Mr. Rogers's
compressing machine, it can be made denser than
wood charcoal, and sold at one-fourth of the
cost. The processes are more fully described
in a small pamphlet by Mr. Yarrow.

A year or two ago, Prince Albert suggested
to the Royal Agricultural Society, in a paper
on the treatment of sewage manure, that use
should be made of upward filtration, through
some absorbing medium, having also a
deodorising power. At the head of his list of
such substances was charcoal. Charcoal
deodorises not by the destruction or change,
but the absorption and the retention in
its substance of the gases which annoy the
nose and undermine the health, although
able to make for us flesh and bone, if we can
compel them to lie among the clods, and be
the servants of our farmers. Sewage matter
filtered through peat-charcoal, which is itself
an excellent manure, leaves in the charcoal
all its fertilising principles, and forms an
inodorous solid substance, fit to be carried off
in sacks, annoying nobody; a manure infinitely
cheaper, and decidedly better than guano, and
placed to the credit of our English harvests.

Mr. Yarrow has received from the town of
Weston-super-Mare the premium for his plan
of draining that town precisely on Prince
Albert's principle. We have the authority of
the chairman of the Dublin Board of Health
in stating, that a large and most offensive
cesspool, in a central part of Dublin, has been
emptied with the use of peat-charcoal, and its
contents carted off in broad day, without the
slightest suggestion to the eyes and noses
in the neighbourhood of the nature of the
operation that was going on. London air is
being poisoned, and London soil is being
saturated with putresceut matter. The curse would
be transformed into a blessing by the free
employment of peat-charcoal, and a large
profit could be made out of the cleansing.
Furthermore, in hospitals, in alleys, in filthy
cellars, peat-charcoal thrown about absorbs
the gases that are in the air. It does not
decompose these, and substitute a coughing
mixture, like chloride of lime; it simply
absorbs and fixes them unaltered in its
substance, wherein they can be carried off
in a bag to fertilise our fields and gardens.

When granulated for sanitary purposes,
according to Mr. Rogers's patent process,
peat-charcoal will digest and hold, deodorised,
a quantity of offensive matter equal to itself
in weight, without allowing the loss of volatile
gases, or any element that gives it a
commercial value. Peat-charcoal would convert
the London drains into a comfortable mine of
wealth. "If it were possible," says Liebig,
"to husband all the filth of London, it would
form the most valuable manure in the world."
Well, we can husband it, and store it in a form
which retains no trace of its origin, and is by
no means filthy. This may be seen at Stanley
Bridge, Fulham, where sewerage, in full
possession of all its filthy characteristics, enters
a tank containing peat-charcoal, and leaves
the tank in a clear stream, without taste or
smell.

Charcoal itself, we should remember, is the
staff of vegetable life; used alone, as a manure,
it renders the soil light and friable, and
ever-absorbent, sucks in abundantly the gases
which plants; require; other manures
impoverish by keeping, charcoal is always
adding to its wealth; what others are too
ready to give out, charcoal is always eager to
take in.

Not only in the cellars and the filthy haunts
of our neglected neighbours, but in stables,
piggeries, and places of that kind, charcoal
upon the floor would keep the animals in
health, and save the loss of volatile manure.
In the pantry a tray of peat-charcoal preserves
the meat; taken from thence, when it requires
renewing, it may be thrown over a stable-floor,
into a privy, or sprinkled about a drain,
to purify the atmosphere, and become in itself
richer as a manure. Strewn over potatoes,
when pitted, it has been found to prevent
disease.

These are some of the uses of peat-charcoal,