The Express.
London, England, 1863-08-03 00:00:00

BETTAWIfIA.

MS Vim., BLITZ iiiiii".7.7l,lMALE CURIOSITY.—
THE GREAT 011011 T ICONS, with Professor Plo.pm'a adaotoz
Hon of M. D.-ela's Spectral filmdom —Werra Woodman and
Randall—TlM MUMS DAUGHTER.—THE HIV/ Off LIYIL

HIGH WATII AT IDIOM WDSL
MS Dal Nornim SST . ..AAsnosa. AL UAL
To-roasor —MareiAL sb. 12m. . .Afferasia. AL Sim

LONDON, MONDAY, AUGUST 3.

OPPOWITNILT, while the Metropolitan Board is
deliberating with dosed doers, on the choice be-
tween rival but secret tenders for the underground
wealth of all London, the father of modern agri-
cultural chemistry comes forward to tell us what
is the worth of the article the Board has to sell.
What he affirms is indeed startling enough, but it
is not new. For years past the leading men in
science and agriculture within Great Britain have
been proclaiming the same facts. They have been
confirmed by experiments repeated under a hun-
dred different conditions. Yet it is well that at
this moment Professor Lizent should add the
weight of his authority, and remind us—as he does
in the letter which we published on Saturday—of
the enormous interest' at stake. For, according
to this most competent and unbiassed of witnesses,
the money value of the ingredients contained in
the sewage of the metropolis exceeds 1,100,0001.
a year. This is the commercial wholesale price of
the several constituents—the potash, the am-
monia, the phosphoric acid—which every year
flows away in the net-work of drains and culverts
beneath our feet, till it reaches the Thames and is
carried down into the sea. True, they exist in a
form which would render thei- extraction by any
artificial process too costly to be remunerative.
But farmers find a large profit in purchasing these
articles in the manufactured state, at the market
prices, and, after reducing them to powder and
solution, in applying them to their crops. Now 41
the sewers they exist in the state to which farmers
reduce them, and therefore for their purposes
they are even more valuable in that liquid
condition than if they were sent out in
sacks and boxes from the manure manufactory.
So it is no false estimate to put their worth to
agriculture at the full price of their contents in the
market. Indeed, in the sewers they exist in even
a more favourable state for inch a purpose than my
into which they can be artificially converted. The
solid ingredients are in a finer state of division, and,
consequently, more soluble than if they had been
dried and powdered, plat as wet clay is plastic and
diffusible, while pounded bricks are gritty and in-
tractable. Add to this, that the mere water in
which these valuable ingredients are dissolved or
suspended contains other elements of great but in-
appreciable value. It is full of nascent com-
pounds, in the most vigorous stage of their opera-
tion. It is charged with carbonic acid gas, the
most benign, yet powerful, of solvents known in
Nature's laboratory. In the act of fermentation it
furnishes warmth as well as the elements of vege-
table growth. And the water itself, irrespective of
its contents, is, as our water meadows everywhere
prove, an invaluable stimulant and uourisher. So,
in truth, the circumstances which combine to make
the sewage useless to a manure manufacturer
actually enhance its value when applied directly to
the land. While so rapid and effectual is the dis-
infecting power of the soil, that it is established by
the experience of numbers of our large towns that
the application is unattended with practical incon-
venience, and after the lapse of a few minutes the
fact cannot be detected by the most sensitive olfac-
tory nerves.

So much as this, then, we have already known,
and Professor LIMO merely confirms. But the
German savant adds a warning which is in some re•
specie novel, and is unquestionably of the highest
importance. He shows that sewage, rich as it
is, is richer in some materials than in others. Mea-
sured against guano it is comparatively rich in pot-
aah and ammonia, comparatively poor in phospho-
ric acid. The reason is obvious ;it is because
everything pasael into the sewers except bones,
and bones are the great storehouse of phosphoric
acid. But phosphoric acid is so essential to vege-
tation, that without a due proportion of it the
other ingredients will not produce their proper
effect. Two consequences follow—the one belong-
ing to the domain of nature, the other affecting
our social relations and the interests of certain
branches of industry. Nature's consequence is,
that sewage will often seem to be comparatively
inert, or only active when applied in large quanti•
ties, merely because this one essential ingredient is
not present in such proportion as to allow the other
and more costly ingredients to operate their full
effect—as men at sea will become diseased and die
in a few months on a diet of meat and bread unless
a due allowance of vegetables be added. And the
social result is, that instead of the use of sewage
being destructive of the trade of the manure
manufacturer, who is chiefly occupied in supplying
phosphoric acid to the farmers, it will, on the
contrary, make him more indispensable than ever,
for it will be only when we add some dissolved
bones, or coprolites, or mineral phosphates, to the
sewage, that we shall reap from it its actual
money value.

This suggestion of the learned Professor may
perhaps furnish an additional means of explaining
certain anomalies which have kept back the pro-
gress of applying sewage to onr farms. We have
said that in hundreds of instances it has yielded,
when tested by practical farmers, proof that its
value has not been over-estimated by scientific
men. Drifting sands of the sea-shore have for a
score of years yielded 201, per acre of rent when
enriched by the sewage of Edinburgh, and better
soil has returned a half more of annual profit.
Five crops of grass in a season, each of unoreos-
dented bulk, have year after year rewarded its
application in other parte of the country. Mr.
Mime, in the neighbourhood of Bristol, doubled
the produce of fourteen acres by the sewage o' a
household of only thirty persons. Lord Eseix
obtained from wheat an increase equal to the raise

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