Abstract
TWO Chadwick public lectures recently delivered at Colchester by Mr. A. J. Martin dealt with the nature and treatment of sewage. Since the very earliest days there have been codes of sanitary laws, but all kinds of readjustments had to be made as soon as men began to congregate in large cities, these crowded conditions seem to be met most satisfactorily by the water-carriage system, by which the clean water supplied to a town returns ultimately to the sewers charged with all manner of pollution. When sewers were first laid the sewage was discharged straight into the rivers. The results were, of course, disastrous, and successive Royal Commissions were set up to find a remedy. The whole problem of sewage purification was obscure, and very little progress was made for a whole generation. Great hopes were centred in sewage farms as a method of disposing of the sewage, and the various local authorities hoped at the same time to reap a profit from the cheap manuring of the land. Sewage farms, however, rarely pay in a humid climate such as ours, for the land cannot deal with the huge amounts of water brought down from the sewers. Many other methods were tried, but in all of them the investigators failed to recognise the existence of the tiny scavengers which Nature provides to deal with our waste products.
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Past and Present Sewage Systems. Nature 105, 792 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105792a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105792a0