Morning journal and courier., 1883-11-12
SINGLE COPIES THREE CENTS.
Monday November 12, 1883.
AN INSTRUCTIVE EXPERIMENT.

AN ANSVRUCV1VE EXPERIMENT..
 We noticed the other day & successful sx- pertinent in utilizing sewage in England. It now appears that an instructive experiment. Of the same nature is in progress in the model city of Pullman, near Chicago, where the great palace car company has built houses for six thousand people.
 A striking feature of Pullman is the mag sive tower which rises from the machine- shops and sustains the water tank for the supply of the works and the city. The sew age of the city flows into g cistern beneath the tower, and is pumped by steam power into conduit, through which it is carried to sprairie farm that was recently an exhausted, barren tract of one thousand five hundred acres. Over this land, which has been tile drained, the sewage is distributed by irriga- tion. Filtered through the soil, the liquid flows into neighboring lake, leaving the solids in the ground to nourish the fruits and plants which supply the city in their season As yet only sixty acres have been thus treat ed, at an expense of $5o,o which during the past season gave the handsome return of $S,500. So from the refuse which is ordina- rily permitted to flow away, or, worse yet, ts lie stagnant and breed disease, have been gathered valuable fertilizers which transform the desert into productive garden.
 This indicates what can be done in the nighborhoed of any city. The American Architect and Building News says: Is 1t not a little remarkable, as an instance of the great econemic importance of the proper use of fertilizers, that, while the pine forests of the Northwest are being laboriously cleared away and burned of to make room for grain, the fields of southern Massachusetts, which grew abundant crops of wheat not many years ago, are every where being sown with the seeds of pine trees; the very plant which our great grandfathers destroyed, to make room for more valuable crops, being now the most profitable growth to be obtained from She become practically sterile. It is hardly too much to say that for such districts as these sewer irrigation affords the best hope of rec lamation. No farmer ten or fifteen miles from the nearest town could think of buying and transporting ordinary manure enough te restore an old pasture lot of one hundred acres to fertility. He can keep 8 small veg etable garden in good condition, but with the rest of his land there is nothing to do but let it grow up with timber. His neiRhbors are in the same condition with himself, and the district in which they live is thus left desert with the exception of an acre here and there of plowed land ard something more of hay ing ground in the alluvial valleys. The sew age of city like Boston furnishes exactly the means for restoration of such land on con- prehensive scale. At moderate estimate she fertilizing value of city sewage properly ap- piled is about s year for each inhabitant, and if the sewage could be brought where it is wanted an annual tract of 50, 900 or 10o,- 900 acres might be restored to productive ness which, with greater care in future, might be made permanent.
 The experiment st Pullman deserves much attention. If the sewage of cities can be placed where it will do some good instead of being left to poison the water and the air, it ought to be-