A Digest of Facts relating to the Treatment and Utilisation of Sewage

Abstract

DR. CORFIELD, now the Professor of Hygiene and Public Health in University College, London, after having been a most distinguished student in the old University of Oxford, has put before the world in a well and large printed volume of something less than 300 pages, a clear, readable, and reliable résumé of the “Great Sewage Question.” The labour which has been thus expended in lightening the labours of others can be adequately judged of by but few persons; but amongst those few may perhaps be reckoned individuals who, like the writer of this review, have for their sins or through their foolishness, been entrapped into serving on the drainage committees of Local Boards, and have felt themselves compelled, in the way of expiation, to purchase, if not to peruse, the hydra, or rather the medusa-brood of blue books which parliamentary commissions and privy council offices are so constantly giving off. Had Professor Corfield always given chapter and verse, page and paragraph, for his citations from the vast number of volumes to which we allude and he has referred, he would have put his claim to credit on the score of painstaking laboriousness more prominently before the eyes of his readers, though he might not thereby have made the reading of his work much the easier for them. As it stands, his book is eminently easy of comprehension, and we will, without further preface, say a few words as to the general outlines of the ground he professes to cover in it.

A Digest of Facts relating to the Treatment and Utilisation of Sewage.

By W. H. Corfield, Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at University College, London. Prepared for the Committee of the British Association. (London: Macmillan & Co. 1870.)