EARTH CLOSETS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 232, 19 December 1874, Page 2

EARTH CLOSETS.

(Abridged from the Illustrated London News.) Labour as philanthropists may, drainage is always their rock ahead, and its heavy rate sends up the rent. The cesspool is gradually becoming a thing of the past, the privy vault and the sewers are an institution. The poison, too, often sinks in its riverward course through the subsoil into the well; and even at the point above tidal influence whence water is supplied from the Thames, the river nymph—to whose “glassy wave” schoolboys have addressed so many copies of hexameters and lyrics is calculated to have received into her bosom the outpourings of 700,000 drains.

Every experiment to deodorise water only ends in vanity and vexation, and by slow degrees the Rev. Henry Moule’s doctrine, that in household service it is cheaper to procure dry earth than to spoil water, meets with fuller acceptance. Dry earth or clay subsoil, small and well sifted, are the most active deodorisers. Hence the peculiar applicability of earth instead of water to closets. The earth must be supplied in detail and not in masses, and these layers are, in fact, the whole secret of the process. Its deodorising agency is so powerful that, when the deposits are removed and placed under cover, the mass smells like fresh loam. Every trace of the orignal and its accompaniments is so completely absorbed that the earth can be used eight or ten times. It has been argued that the necessary manipulation would act practically as a veto on the system ; but it may be argued in reply that it is easier to carry dry earth up stairs than to pump water into a cistern. Public institutions have found no difficulty in its application. Mr. Simms, in a memorandum on disinfection, dated “ Privy Council Office, 1866,” also gives his official sanction to the earth closets in country places, where proper drainage is not provided. Beyond this guarded recommendation Government has not as yet ventured to go. Ali ttle vi 1 lage in Sussex affords a striking proof that the “'manipulation” of the system is by no means difficult. In two large towns companies have been formed for the same end. They have set up drying sheds and manure warehouses, and not only remove the the pails nightly, or clear out the vaults at intervals, but supply dry earth if needed; and a company in Bedfort-street Covent Garden, manufacture earth closets. It is, iu truth, only the application of the right agency by which all the dust is reremoved in Paris, where no dustbins are allowed by law. Custom in this matter would soon become second nature when quickened by the discovery that “it pays” to adopt. By pursuing it steadily cottagers are enabled to have very much larger vegetable crops, and farmers have been quite ready to pay £3 a ton for such manure when they can get it. Experiments have been proved in fifteen cases that a quarter of an acre manured with 1 cwt. of it, which had been kept five mouths and used seven times, can grow swedes one-third heavier than ground dressed with superphosphate. Another farmer substituted earth closet for crushed bones, at the rate of 1 cwt. per acre, and grew a most admirable crop of white turnips. Mr. Dickenson, of New Park Farm, Hampshire, also gives his experience to the effect that the mixture is equal to crushed bones in power, more immediately in its action, and calculated to last three years in the ground. Such are a few of the benefits of a system which might also revolutionise our present drainage and add permanent health and wealth. As Mr. Moule well observes in his “ Manure for the Million ”:— “ In God’s providence there is no waste. It was never meant that even privy soil, or the sink water, or the water of the slop bucket should be useless ; still less was it meant that they should poison fresh air and produce sickness,” and too often death.