sea-sand, are sold by auction every year at
from twenty to thirty pounds an acre. The
liquid that runs into the sea after percolation
of the sewage through the soil, is said to be
inoffensive.

Another way of applying refuse of towns
to the land has been brought into use at
Rugby and elsewhere. Pipes are laid down,
the sewage matter is conveyed by them to the
land, and then applied by hose and jet. But
the commission reports that at Rugby the
expense has been incurred of laying down
cast-iron pipes over an area of four hundred
and seventy acres, though there is only the
water supply and waste of seven thousand
persons to be turned to use. The average
annual supply of the waste from fifteen
persons to an acre of land can be of a value that
bears no sensible proportion to the cost of
its application. The Rugby supply can, in
fact, only water ten acres a day, giving them
a quantity something less than an inch of
rain fall. In dry weather that is of great
value; but as each acre's fair turn for being
watered can only come round once in forty-seven
days, it is obvious that the works are
too large for the town. The same mistake
has been made, though not to a like extent,
at Watford. Again: as the sewage of a town
is a constant supply, and must be got rid of
daily, its application to fields that cannot
regularly receive it, that must be watered at
one time of the year and at another time left
dry, is a mistake. Its use should be limited
to grass lands. If heed be paid to these
matters, and to the proper execution of the
engineering works, direct application of the
liquid manure of a small town to the
meadows in its neighbourhood is the most
profitable form in which it is possible for sewage
to be applied to land. But when the town is
large, with suburbs round about it, the
proportion between cost and profit is entirely
different. The use of liquid manure on a
farm lies wholly within the discretion of the
farmer; but the use of sewage manure must
be constant. On the other hand, farm manure
gives to the land only what was taken from
it, but town sewage is always an addition of
new wealth.

At Leicester and Tottenham the plan is in
use which more especially suggests what may
be done in large cities built upon the banks
of rivers. The chemical action of lime upon
sewage causes it to separate into two parts—
a clear liquid which, though capable of
decomposition, is comparatively pure, and may
be poured off into the river without causing
any serious pollution, and a deposit of mud
which may be sold or given away as manure.
A nuisance charged upon the works at
Leicester and Tottenham proceeds not from the
process of separation, but from the drying of
the mud for sale. It has not value enough
to bear the cost of drying by artificial heat,
but is dried by exposure, and a nuisance is
the natural result. At Cheltenham they
have a better plan. They mix the sludge
with ashes and scavengers' refuse, and so
make at once a solid manure for which
farmers readily give half-a-crown a cubic
yard; a shilling more (which it perhaps is
worth to them) would meet all working
expenses and interest on the outlay for the
works.

It is, of course, the solid waste that rots
in our streams, and on the banks of our tidal
rivers, poisoning the air. To cancel all the
hurt that it does, and turn it into benefit, is a
sufficient object of ambition. It constitutes
indeed only five parts in a hundred of the
whole bulk of the sewage, and four-fifths of
its fertilising power would be contained in
the water which we throw away. We retain
by this plan a fifth of the value in a twentieth
of the bulk, and get rid altogether of a
difficulty that now meets us only in its beginnings.
Perplexed now with the offscourings of towns
that are not more than half scoured, what
shall we do with them when the scouring is
complete?

It only remains for us to tell what the
commissioners suggest in the case of London.
Treating the metropolis as a number of small
towns, they would line each side of the
Thames with an embankment, so far advanced
into the water that it might cover basins for
the barges whenever there is wharf property
on either shore. Where there is no wharf
property, they would fill in the space between
the river terrace and the shore with garden
ground. The embankment would prevent
all tidal deposit, aud would consist of a series
of closed reservoirs for all the sewage that
now falls into the Thames. These terraces
would be less offensive than our streets,
which, of course, run also over sewage, but
have (as the reservoirs would not have)
gratings of communication between the sewer
poison and the public. London drainage on
each side of the Thames could then be planned
with intercepting sewers to carry off the flow
from high ground, and relieve low lying
districts, and with pumps where necessary, to
be carried directly into these great reservoirs,
then precipitated with lime and got rid of:
partly by the flow of the clear and practically
harmless liquid into the stream of the Thames,
partly by distribution of the deodorised mud
for agricultural use, probably without more
charge to the farmer than his own cost of its
conveyance to his fields.

The execution of such a plan would cost
three or four millions of pounds sterling; but
that sum is far short of the expense proposed
for the conveyance of the London sewage to Sea
Reach; while it gives more fertility to London
fields, a noble embankment to the Thames, a
spacious river walk and gardens to the
Londoners on the Middlesex side; and, on the
Surrey side, a means of bringing the South-
eastern line of railway into a west-end, and
the south-western line into a city terminus.

So runs the best reply we have yet seen to