The Express.
London, England, 1858-09-29 00:00:00

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LONDON WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 29.

SPORTING INTRLLIGENCR.

A SPECIAL EDITION of the "EXPRESS,"
@attaining the results of the days R 8414, ill pub-
lished every evening during the Sporting Season, at
Sts o'clock.

Dittmar! readers of sanitary reports and trea-
tises have doubtless long ago arrived at the ccmclu-
Mon that, after all, the position of DAMOCLES, dining
with a sword suspended over hie head, was less
wiles, than that of the Sunni and Bnowns of
this great metropolis. Boated at the domestic
hearth, surrounded by the little SMITHS and BROWNS.
OT pursuing their business avocations in the crowded
thoroughfare, a whole armoury of these invisible
swords surrounds them, not only impending over
their head., but threatening them from below and
on every side. The marvel is that the whole body of
life assurance companies have not gone into the
Gazette long ego, from which they have probably been
preserved, some by amalgamation, others by the
lack of foresight, which prevents the bulk of the
people who are not in debt from insuring their lives,
and from thinking that they must die some day,
and that they may leave a large family and small
siesta behind them. Who:can forget the consterna-
tion created by the publication of Acccu'e " Death
" in the Pot"? We awoke suddenly to the fact that
we rarely at down to dinner without great risk of
imbibing mortal poison, or, at the very least, laying
the foundation of terrible and insidious diseases.
But we gst hardened to it at last, like the
labourers in gunpowder mills, and once more
ate our =ale with quiet minds. Thee some cha-
ritable men of science demonstrated to us that we
were living over a sort of miasmatic volcano, and
that our forefather., by hiding away huge cesspools
under our houses, had been contriving ingenious bine
of choice old typhus that might, and sometimes did,
steal out and lay us low more potently and more
durably than the contents of our other cellars could
do. Against this evil, however, many of us were
preserved by dwelling in new neighbourhoods ; those
who were less fortunate attacked the enemy bodily,
and, after some loss, succeeding in routing him. Far
a while we were tolerably quiet, until the invention of
ozone, and the intimation that it was somehow myste-
riously related to cholera. Now axone was a very
different affair to the halfpence our cooks put into
the saucepan with the greens, or the catacombs of
filth our forefathers had constructed under our cel-
lars. These latter we could see and attack with
solid weapons, but this new terror was an impal-
pable ghost. Who was to know whether there
was the proper amount of ozone in the atmosphere
when he arose in the morning, and whether the
faint ham that mistified the distant chimney-pots
was smoke, fog, or some state of the air indicating
too teeth or too little of the newly discovered vital
element? Had it not been for Dr. Ilassin.t there is
no knowing what mi,tht have bee of us, but on
the honitoopathic principle he abolished one terror
by introducing somber.
The " Adulteration of Food" excitement threw the
days of "Death in the Pot" into the shade. Every
newspeper was full of it, the Legislature took it up,
a House of Commons Committee sat upon it, and
gave birth to a tremendous Blue Book, and Weary-
ewe who had a microscope and a teapot turned any
chemist and detector of adulterations. We
had all come to the knowledge of the horrid fact that
we were eating red lead with our fish, verdigris
with our greengage tarts, abominations innumerable
with our cocoa, alum and bones with our bread, end
regaling our little progeny with poisonous sugar-
plums. Somehow, in spite of everything, the Bills
of Mortality indicated no such increase of deaths,
or abbrevi►tion of the usual term of existence,
as might have been anticipated from this long list of
sappers of healthy so it must be assumed that like
the arsenic eaters, we bad accustomed our constitn_
tioos to the unwholesome air and diet, and that we
rather thrived upon them. This year the noble
common sewer of Loudon, Father Thames, has
fairly (righted us all from our propriety, and terrified
the Legislature into waking up from its dreamy do_
nothingness for the evil odours presumed to come
"betwixt the wind and its nobility." So the Act
was passed commanding Messrs. Tli WAIVES
and Co. to do eometAiieg, to their intense
consternation apparently, since the only result
of their bringing forward a proposition seems
to be, that a multitude of voices is forthwith
raised to warn them that it is exactly the project
they ought not to adopt. It would seem as if the
purification of the Thames were likely to be reserved
as a luxury for the next generation.

But in connexion with this subject, the Sanitary
Council of the City has Incited their chief officer,
Dr. LLTHIBT, to publish a report which is worse
than the cesspools, and the ozone, and the red lead
anchovy mance, as a collection of terrors. And what
b ware alarming, he show. us how difficult, how
Pearly impossible it is to guard against them. What
with omnibus. "nursing" each other, houses tum-
bling into the street without crying " Below," and
paving boards turning up tresawas of black earth
saturated with gas leakage at every corner, walking
the streets of London has become a far more peril-
ous operation than in the days when Gar wrote his
Trivia." The effects of thee. preserves of cubit-
rutted hydrogen on health and life are not to be
thought of without alarm; for gradually the whole
of the upper surface of the soil is becoming as.
tamest with that gas of which Dr. LCTHEBT in-
forms = that an admixture of from seven to twelve

per cent. is fatal to oats and doge ; his experiments
leaving us to infer by analogy only its effects upon
bipeds. He tells as that frets 12 to 38 per seat..--a
tolerably wide margin happily—of all the gas mann-
factored in London is lest, and that the leakage alone
mates about 6 per cent., which is absorbed by,
sad partly stored up in, the earth under our
tbst, nAs much as 386,400,000 cubic fest of gas
" escape into the public ways of this metropolis
" every year." Good heavens ! the eight of the nine
figures takes our breath away, for we know that thi
earth, excellent as it is as an antiseptic, cannot go
on neutralising this enormous quantity for ever.
Then we come to sewers--and we must remind our
readers that they encounter a gully hole every few
yards, a fact which their noses have probably im-
pressed upon them efficiently. Now, these •gully
holes communicate with reservoirs of poisonous and
death-dealing ingredients. Not only is there a large
amount of the escaped gas contained In them, but
sulphuretted hydrogen is generated in such quanti-
ties in some localities that nature has established a
rival gas manufactory under ground, and you may
ignite the bubbles as they arise. If the sewer is
closed up for a long time marsh gel is generated to
each an extent that the sewer is like a charged bomb-
shell, and may blow itself and us up on the smallest
provocation. Worst of all, our noses are by no means
safe guides to the danger; for while some of the I
nastiest smells are quite harmless, there ars pestilen-
tial vapours of the most deadly kind which give no
notice of their presence, and which stab you, as it
were, in the dark. We said that Dr. Lassos[
provides us with no remedy against the perils he
indicates. This statement we are bound to modify;
but we oars hardly believe that he is in esmest when
he tells us that a small box containing a few penny-
worth of wood charcoal, placed in the course
of the draught through which the deleterious gases
paw, completely neutralises them. It is true
that he does not quite see his way to
make all the game pan through those draughts, and
leaves that to the special men, the engineers, to
devise. Seriously, then, although we get on tole-
rably well with all these evils, that is no sufficient
reason for enduring them patiently; for there may
be, and probably is, a point at which they must
become as fatal as the plague in the olden time,
which often slept for years, but at last broke out
with deadly and irresistible force. In an age like
the present is it a matter of necessity that the soil
of every street in London should be saturated with
nauseous gams which render it dangerous to disturb
the paving in hot weather? and with all our engi-
neering ingenuity, can no one devise a method of
making the sewer exhalations pass through those
little boxes of charcoal which would render them
harmless P Great rewards have been given to men ,
who have devised modes of destroying their fellow-
mortals wholesale; have we no recompense to pro-
pose that may stimulate some one to invent means
of saving us from what is certainly a great annoy-
ance and which is, or at least is very likely to be-
come, a serious peril