Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ...in water do not appear, as a rule, to exercise a marked influence in the promotion of premature death. The influence of water polluted with putrefying organic filth is seen in the production by it of fatal diarrhoea and dysentery, and in the propagation of enteric fever and malignant cholera. There is something inexpressibly revolting in the notion of persons and communities drinking water mingled with their own excrement, and yet it is one of the commonest facts of every-day life; and in addition, as we now know, excrement-polluted water is not rarely given to our infants and young children mingled with the milk on which they are fed. (c) Soil--The part of the soil in the promotion of premature death is as a source of pollution of the air we breathe and of the water we drink. The soil is the great laboratory in which the great mass of solid and liquid filth of those who live upon it undergoes John Simon:, Supplementary Report of Medical Officer of Privy Council and Local Government Board, .87 P-New Series, No. . its final decomposition and resolution into harmless elements. But when this soil becomes surcharged with filth its wholesome action ceases, and the changes which the filth undergoes within it commonly stop short at a period when its products are harmful to those living upon it. These products are taken up by the water in the soil and carried into the springs and wells, and they are also giv%n off into the air above the soil by the movements of the air within the soil outwards, as it is influenced by the varying level of the sub-soil water, by variations of pressure in the atmosphere, and by other circumstances which go to bring about the breathing, so to say, of the sub-soil. The atmosphere in its general aspects must be.