The progressive farmer. [volume] (Winston, N.C.) 1886-1904, 1889-12-10
IMPURE WATER.

Agricultural science should mani
testify include the hygiene of the
country home. Everything which in
creases the sick rate reduces the pro.
duciDg capacity of any agricultural
community. and in so far tends to in
crease the cost of food supply and
diminish the comforts of life. 1t is
taken for granted that the water sup
ply of the country home as received
at the hand Of nature needs no especial
care to preserve its purity. This is a
great and fatal error "The old
oaken bucket that hangs in the well, :"
the said we'll being contaminated with
surface drainage, has clad many a
score in their last cloth. Even the
spring that sparkling fountain from
which the family for generations have
drunk sweet and cool and pure, life.
giving draughts, by injudicious loca-
tion of pig sty or privy becomes pois.
oned, and the children of the house
hold are borne untimely to the family
graveyard. This is but page from
many chapter of real life. First and
foremost and above all other things,
let the head of the country home real
ize that he is responsible for the pur
ity of the water he gives his family to
drink. If it be pure he must keep it
so, if it be not pure he must make it
so. No duty laid upon him is or can
be more imperative. He can see to
this, however hard times, or narrow
the income; he must see to it at what
ever cost of personal convenience.
However imperative, nevertheless, it
is duty Of which most farmers are
utterly unconscious or ignorant. Few
of them are capable Of an intelligent
opinion as to the security or insecurity
of the water supply from the contami-
nation IF the dangerous surface drain
age. Cholera, typhoid fever, dysen-
terry, dlphtheria, malarial fever, are
all liable to propagation through con
taminated water And if the specific
contagion' be lodged in filth-reeking
soil, to ooze thence into filth satur-
ated water, the peril becomes immi
nent, deadly, and continuous. But
besides this, an immense amount of
chronic suffering is entailed by the
nabitual use of unclean water. Indi,
gestion (but another name for good
for-nothingness), malaria, jaundice>
diarrhea, headache, neuralgia, back
ache (whence come irrltability, quar-
relingsl, WEAKNESS of life-all these
ultimate in habitual use of unclean
water for drinking, cooking and wash
ing. Even toddy or julip mixed with
filth saturated water does no good.
AS old Burton hath it in his "Anat-
omy of Melancholy" such drinks can
not expel those "black humors " which
produce those jars and fractions of the
household, as between man and his
mother in law, and every inconven.
fence of modern life. An old well
placed in a situation to receive the
washings from the backdoor yard, the
slop- barrel, the pig-sty, walled up with
rock piled againat the earth, no ce-
ment, no mortar, is perhaps at once
the dirtiest and most dangerous of all
places. If there must be well, let it
be modern well, a well bored as
deep as possible, and the hole cased
all the way down to the bottom, and
SO defended that no sort of surface
filth can by any possibility flow in at
the top AS to a spring, if it be
down hill from any place where fifth
of any sort is produced or temporarily
deposited, its contamination is merely
a question of time The time will
surely come when it will be speci6cal-
ly poisoned, and then somebody must
die.-M. g. E7tzay, in Eeononaast.