The Sun.
London, England, 1858-07-21 00:00:00

LONDON, WEDNESDAY EVENING, JULY 21, 1858.

GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY.-
On WEDNESDAY, the 23 th of July, an EXCURSION
TRAIN will leave PADDINGTON at 8.0 a.m. for PLY KOUTEI
(offering facilities for visiting Torbay, Brixham, Dartmouth, and
the South Coast of Devon), calling at Weston-super-Mare, Bridge.
water, Taunton, Tiverton-road, Exeter, Barnstaple, and Bideford
(for Ilfracombe, and the North Coast of Devon), Starcrcas, Dawlish,
Teignmouth, Newton. Torquay, Totness, and Kin:Abridge-road, and
returning on Saturday, the 7th of August, from I lymoutb, at
6.20 a.m., and intermediate stations as per handoills.

FARES THERE AND BACK.
Weston-super-Mare and Bridgewater, 20s and 13s; Tinnton and
Tiverton Road, 22s and 15s; Exeter, 22s Gd and 16s; starcross,
Dawlish, and Teignmouth, 253 and 17s : Newton, Torquay, and
Totnesa, 27s and 18s ; Barnstaple and Bide'ord, 30s and 20s; Kings-
bridge Road and Plymouth, 30s and 20s.
Children under twelve years of age. half-price. Tickets not trans-
ferable, and only available by the Excursion Train.

WEYMOUT.EI and CHANNEL ISLANDS
STEAM-PACKET COMPANY (Limited).—DAY-PAS-
SAGES (via WEYSIOUTH).—SHORTEST SEA ROUTE—RE-
TURN TICKETS, on and after the lot June, between Paddington
and all the principal stations of the Great Western Railway, and
GUERNSEY and JERSEY, available for one month, allowing pas-
sengers to break the jowney at Chippenham, Dorchester, Weymouth,
and Guernsey, en route to or from Jersey.
Fares—From Paddington to Guernsey and Jersey and back, 455.
and 355., by the AQUILA or CYGNUS, fast steam-ships, from Wey-
mouth Harbour, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, at
Eight, a.m. JOSEPH MAUNDERS, Manager and Secretary.

BUCKINGHAMSHIRE RAIL W A Y
COMPANY.

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN. That the next ordinary II ALF-
YE AULT MEETING of the Proprietors in the Buckingham hire
Railway Company will be held at the Easton Station, London, on
FRIDAY, the 13th day of August, 1854, at 11 o'clock a.m.
By order of the Board.
HARRY VERNEY, Chairman.
_ _

The Books kept for the Registration of Transfers of Stock will he
Closed on the 2d August, and will remain so until after the
meeting.
_ . .

Office of the Company, Eueon-station,
Loudon, 19. h July, 1858.

QPOTTISWOODE and C 3•, PRINTERS,
NEW-srazrr SQUARE, LONDON, beg to announce that-Mr-the
convenience of Members of Parliament, Parliamentary Agents,
Solicitors, and others, they have established a WEST-END OFFICE
at 9, PARLIAIUENT.!TREET, WESTMINSTEit, S.W.

BENJAMIN EDGINGTON, 2, Duke-street,
Southwark, Marquee, Tent, Flag; and Rick-cloth Manufac-
turer. Tonlorary Rooms of any dimensions, adapted for any season
of the year, for ballQ, d'nners, &c., with conveyance and attendance
to any distance. Marquees and Tents for hortictotural societies
cricket clubs, &c., new and second-band, on sale or hire—Addr,ss,
at full length, to Benjamin Edgington, 2, Duke-street, Southwark.

THE PURIFICATION OF THE THAMES.

The following is the report of the Select Commit-
tee on the River Thames :

" Your committee, in accordance with their order
of reference, have proceeded to inquire into the
merits of Mr. Goldsworthy Gurney's plan for puri-
fying the Thames, and they have also considered
some other suggestions having the same object in
view. They have examined, with regard to these
matters, many persons of great skill and eminent
in their professions as engineers and chemists ; but
the near approach of the termination of the session
and other reasons, which will be stated in this re-
port, have prevented them from examining several
other persons who had suggestions to make upon
the general subject, and information to give, which
might doubtless be deserving of attention.
" The main object of Mr. Gurney's plan is to
discharge all the sewage of the metropolis into
water of the Thames withi❑ nu metropolis itself,
and his plee Lueded on the assumption that the
Lad smells which are so much complained of pro-
ceed from the decomposition of sewage matter de-
posited on those parts of the bed of the river which
are left uncovered by water during the ebb and
early flow of the tide. Ho is of opinion that this
matterferments while in contact wit h atmospheric air
and exposed to solar heat, and that the fermenta-
tion thus begun continues afterwards, when this
matter is washed up by the rising water ; but he
thinks that if this matter could be discharged at
once into the stream it would not so ferment, and
would be almost inoffensive.

"In order to work out this theory, Mr. Gurney
proposes that the bed of the river, commencing
from an average or mean line of the present wharves
and extending for 50 yards towards the low-water
line, should be formed with a slope of about 1 in
12, and covered with gravel. Ho reckons that on
such a slope, so covered, no mud or sewage matter
would permanently lodge, and that whatever was
deposited upon such a sloping bank at high water
would be swept down into the permanent bed of
the river by the receding tide. But in some parts
of the river the distance between high and low water
marks is so great that a slope of 1 inch in 12, be-
ginning at the mean of the present wharf walls,
would, by the time it reached low water-mark, end
at a point a good deal lower
.than the bed of the
river there, and to got rid of this difficulty, as well
as to ensure a stronger current and a larger body
of water at low water-mark to carry away the mat-
ter swept down from the slopes, he proposes to form
by dredging two channels, one on each side of the
river, and each of them following the line of the
present edge of the slopes. These channels he pro-
po_es to make 90 feet wide, and 9 feet deep, and his
notion is that the sewage matter from each side,
washed into these channels, would be carried in-
offensively down the river, and that the force of the
current would keep these channels clear.
" Having thus, as he conceives, secured the bed
of the river between high and low water-mark from
any permanent deposit from the water of the river,
he proposes to lengthen all the sewers that discharge
into the river, and to carry them on, so that their
mouths should all be below the low water-mark,
so that everything coming down the sewers should
always be discharged into the water of the river.
" But by this arrangement the sewers would al-
ways be water-locked, and the gases generated in
the sewers, having no escape at the mouths, would
be more driven than at present to find their way
into the stree's and houses. In order to counteract
this tendency, Mr. Gurney proposes that furnaces
should be erectel in various parts of London over
spine of the main sewers, and at suitable places, and
that these furnaces should draw the bad gases out
of the sewers,-and by the process of combustion to
alter their chymical condition, so as to render them
harmless and inoffensive.

" Your committee cannot recommend the adop-
tion or any part of Mr. Gurney's plan.
" Your committee consider it a mistake to snp-
pose that sewage matter does not disengage offensive
and noxious gases when it is mixed with water.
The contrary is proved by the offensive s mell of those
sewers through which large streams of water are
constantly flowing, and by the offensive smells which
during the present summer have proceeded from the
water of the Thames at high tide, at every part
from Putney downwards. Any plan, therefore,
which has for its object that all the sewage of Lon-
don should, in the state in which it comes down
the sewers, be discharged into the stream o' the
Thames, would tend to perpetuate and not to
remedy the evils which are so widely felt and so
loudly complained of.

"Some advantages might possibly be derived
from sloping -the bed of the river in the manner
proposed by Mr. Gurney, in places where the dis-
tance between high and low water mark would
admit of it, but such an operation taken singly
would not get rid of the great evil which we are
now considering.
" With regard to the side channels which Mr.
Gurney proposes to make, it seems very doubtful
whether they would be kept open without fre-
quent dredging, and whether if kept open they
would produce any beneficial effect commensurate
with the expense of forming them and keeping
them open.
" Your committee are therefore of opinion that
those parts of Mr. Gurney's plan which relate to
the river are not calculated to effect the purification
of the Thames.

" Your committee, however, thought it was de-
sirable that they should investigate that part of
Mr. Gurney's plan which relates to the burning of
the gases in the sewers, and the more so, because
that process has been practised by Mr. Gurney
with success in regard to sewers in the immediate
vicinity of the Houses of Parliament.
"But the !inquiries' made by your committee
have satisfied them that this process, though it may
ba successful as to sewers within a short distance of
the furnace by which the gases are to ba. burnt,

could not be successfully applied to the wide range
of the metropolis: There are such a vast number
of unavoidable openings in the immense ramifica-
tions of the sewers of the metropolis, and in the
house drains which communicate with those sewers,
that the air which would ba drawn out from any
part of a great sewer over which a furnace might be
erected would.bereplaCed, not by the offensive gases
in the' whole network of sewers and drains commu-
nicating with the sewer over which the furnace was
placed, but in a great degree by atmospheric air
rushing down through openings near to the fur-
nace, and thus the gases in the further parts of the
sewers and house drains would remain unaffected
by the action of the furnace.

" This furnace syntem, therefore, oven with the
improvements made by Mr. Gurney, thaugh pos-
sibly very efficacious for a particular and limited
area, could not be relied upon for the general ven-
tilation and purification of the sewers of the metro-
polis at large. .
" Your committee have taken much valuable
and interesting evidence upon the deodorisation of
sewage. It appears to be easy to separate.the more
solid from .the. liquid parts of the sewage, and to
deprive both of all offensive smell. By an infusion
of lime into sewage the solid matter is rapidly pre-
cipitated, and the water that is left above the pre-
cipitate is cleared of all the natter which it held in
suspension, retaining only our salts, which it
holds in solution.
"If the sewage of London could be so treated,
and the solid precipitate could be got rid of in a
satisfactory manner, the liquid might be discharged
into the Thames without injury or inconvenience,
provided that no nuisance arose during the process
of deodo,risation.

" This system is now adopted at Leicester, and,
in as far as it is a sanitary arrangement, with COM-
pieta success. The town is freed front all offensive
matter, and the liquid which is discharged into the
river does not pollute the water of the streams.
" Experience his not yet determined in what
degree the precipitate can be made useful as manure
for agricultural purposes.
" Several persons capable of giving valuable in-
formation on this subject have offered to be ex-
amined by your committee, but your committee
have not deemed it expedient to prolong their in-
quiries on this branch of the subject.
" In the first place, they have felt it their duty,
consideiing how near the session is to its close, not
to delay longer their, report upon the main subject
referred to them by the house—namely, Mr. Gur-
ney's plan ; and in the next place, they conceive
that the . decision as to the expediency of ap-
plying a system of deodorisation advantageously
to the sewage of the metropolis belongs rather to
the functions of the Melropelitan Bo u 1 of Works
than to those of a committee of the House of Com-
mon; and the Metropulit•in Board of Works have
ample means of making all necessary inquiries on
that subject without the assistance of a committee
of the House of Commons.

"Your committee have to observe that some of
the eminent engineers who have been examined
express an opinion in favour of embanking the
Thames for the purpose of increasing the scour of
the stream and preventing the accumulation of mud.
"In conclusion, your committee beg leave to
state their decided opinion that no plan ought to be
adopted in regard to the sewn) of the metropolis
that does not provide for one of two things—either
that the sewage shall be carried d'wn to some point
in the river sufficiently far from the metropolis to
prevent the sewage from being brought back in an
offensive state by the flowing tile, or else that the
sewage shall be deodorised, and that only the puri-
fied liquid part of it shall, be discharged into the
river.

" The whole subject is one of great and of grow-
ing public importance. The metropolis is extending
in all directions, and in every part of it 3 circumfe-
rence. Every ys'ar fresh zussses of buildings are
springing up, whose drains Are discharging into
the Thatne4, and streets that had only cesspools are
furnished with house drains, leadiag into the gene-
ral network of sewers ; thus every year the quan-
tity of sewage discharged into the Thames goes on
increasing.

"On the other band, year by year the quantity
of water in the bed of the river, by which this in-
creasing quantity of sewage is to be diluted, pro-
gressively diminishes. A. large portion of the water
which is supplied to the metropolis is taken from
the Thames above Teddington-lock, and with the
yearly increase of the metropolis, and the improv-
ing habits of its population, the consumption of this
water increases, and a larger portion of the diluting
current is withdrawn from the downstream of the
river.

"An extensive and abundant suprly of pure water,
and the general substitution of house drains for cess-
pools, are immense improvements in the arrange-
ments of the metropolis, and contribute most essen-
tially to the comfort and health of its inhabitants.
But these salutaryarrangements must be followed
up by others, to protect from pollution the Thames,
which ought to be an ornament of thi3 great city,
and which must continue to be the
main highway
of its multifarious traffic."

(Front
ntkpeaprlaiialmy News.)
enth:ive not attained
to clearer notions than the Imperial Parliament as
to the best mode of setting about the purification of
the Thames, the ratepayers of the metropolis have
certainly a cheerful prospect before them. Quot
homines, tot sententioe ;
every member had his
nostrum, and every
member's nostrum differed
from that of every other member. Well might Mr.
Locke (of Southwark) exclaim, in the very per-
plexity of his heart, that, however doubtful it
might be, whether sewage admitted of solution, it
was plain the sewage question did not. One or two
points, however, were elicited in the chaotic dis-
cussion of Monday night which are deserving of
attention. One is, that the Government bill, as in-
terpreted by its promoters, leaves the Board of
Works free, and does mot lie them down to the
adoption of any particular scheme. , It will be emi-
nently desirable that before the bill becomes an
act this point should be made to clear for the pos-
sibility of doubt. Another point to be borne in
mind is the testimony of Robert Stephenson. This
able and clear-headed person declares that he has
carefully sifted every imaginable scheme, and that
he finds no possibility of doing without some sys-
tem of intercepting drainage. There is ono other
point, and that is that the Board of Works, though
they may not number amongst them any first-rate
attention to all the schemes that have beonnames, have at all events* given painful and dili-
gent
submitted to thPm, and also that they may reason-
ably be expected to take no impor taut step without
further and very anxious investigation, now that
the entire responsibility of the great work is, for
the first time, imposed upon them. If, indeed, we
were driven to conclude that the Board of Works,
after being invested with plenary powers, would
merely fall back, without further investigation, on
the scheme vetoed by Sir B. Hall, there might be
considerable cause for well-grounded appreherpion.
But it may reasonably be hoped that this will not
be the case. They can hardly, for instance, neglect
the consideration of the evidence which has so re-
cently been submitted to the House of Commons'
committee ; and they will naturally be anxious, for
their own sakes, not to incur the odium of an enor-
mous
expenditure in brick and mortar, unless con-
scientiously
convinced that such expenditure is
absolutely essential to tte end in view.
It cannot be denied—as has been very ably
pointed out by a correspArdeut writing under the
slnatura of "Common Sense," that the method of
pouring, at vast expense, all the faecal products of
a great city into a tidal river is diametrically op-
posed to many of the plainest principles of a judici-
ous economy. It is natural that any one writing;
under the influence of common sense should con-
demn the apparent solecism of digging at an enor-
mous outlay two artificial rivers of pollution, whose
functions will be to intercept from the natural
river, which it is desired to purify, not only all
the sewage which pollutes it, but all the surface
water. without which it cannot he kept pure. Com-
mon sense naturally inclines to the belief that there
must, after all, be some method of making thou-
sands, by utilising that as manure, which we are
now asked to spend millions iu throwing away as

refuse. Common sense.is quite ready to adopt the
formula recently enunciated by Mr. P. O. Ward,
" the sewage to the soil, -and the rainfall to the
river." No doubt, if the matter were res iutcgra,
if we were still in the age of cesspools--if we
had not sunk millions in the vast subterranean
works which daily. carry all -the pollution of the
capital into the river we now want to purify
—a great deal might be said in favour of the
adoption of these views. But this is not the
true condition of the question. Under the influ-
ence of the drainage doctors, we have gone on
year after year constructing a system of costly con-
duits for carrying every rivulet of sewage into the
Thames. Is this cost and outlay all to go for no-
thing ? No one with a nose and a memory can fail
to entertain some gratitude to ihe.drainage doctors
for what they have done. They have improved
the sslubrity of our houses and the at atmosphere
of our streets. Under the recent somewhat excep-
tional circumstances of a long drought and an in-
tense beat—with very little flow of fresh water
from above, and a consequently increased flood of
salt water from below—the Thames has been unut-
terably offensive. But have any portions of Lon-
don except those which lie along the line of the
river been exceptionally incelorous, or has any part
of London, even including the river districts, been
exceptionally unhealthy?
It may well be doubted, therefore, quite irre-
spective of all questions of cost, whether it would
be wise to abandon altogether the eyStem of drain-
age which has now for some years been •so perse
veringly carried out, with effects, on the whole, so
beneficial to the public health. But if this be so,
vrhaf remains to be done unless it'be•the adoption
pastly of deodorising works, partly of intercepting,
sewers ? . We are quite of opinion the Metropolitan
Board of-Works, before arriving at a final decision,
is bound once more seriously and" dispassionately
to review the whole question. In order that they
may do so, every, expression denoting a foregone
conclusion, or pledging the Board to a specific plan,
such as the phrase " providing outfalls," and the
like, should carefully be eliminated from the GJ
vernment Bill. Nu fetter should be left on their
discretion. The whole power and the entiie
responsibility should be theirs. Under these con-
ditions we are really not aware that anything
better can be done than to leave the question
of Metropolitan Drainage in the hands of those
to whom is ostensibly entrusted the Local Ma-
nagement of the Metropolis. Somewhere the
power must reside, if the thing is to be done at all.
If we wait tiil all the doctors are agreed in their
specifies, till the whole fraternity of engineers
are of one mind in their recommendations, our fate
will be that of the classical rustic ; the river of
pollution will roll and welter with ever growing
noisomeness while we are disputing on its banks ;
labitur et labetur. There is a thing to be done,
and that speedily. We must get some one to do
it. Whoever undertakes it must have full powers.
There must be no double government, no veto.
Well, then, where is this depository of power to be
found? Is there any single man so pre-ernireu'iy
fitted for the function that all roc., would unani-
mously concur in his selection? There is not. Is
the [louse of Commons adequate to the work ?
Let the discussion of Monday night-answer. There
remains, then, the Metropolitan Board—men who
have already investigated the subject with consider-
' able assiduity, and may fairly be expected, under
the pressure of freshly imposed responsibility, to
go through a further process of exhaustive inquiry
before committing themselves to decisive action.
Really, it is difficult to see what better selection
could, under the circumstances, have been made.
If we are to adopt the principle !het no•hitig shall
be spent till everybody is agreed, the year 1958
may still find the grandchildren of Thwaites dis-
puting, in the midst of stench to which that of last
June was fragrance, over plans and sections, with
the descendants in the third remove of .Mr. F. 0.
Ward.