"The importance of any plan by which the excrement of our bodies may be returned to our fields is in a measure shown in the following extract from an article that I furnished for the American Agricultural Annual for 1868.
"The average population of New York City—including its temporary visitors—is probably not less than 1,000,000. This population consumes food equivalent to at least 30,000,000 bushels of corn in a year. Excepting the small proportion that is stored up in the bodies of the growing young, which is fully offset by that contained in the bodies of the dead, the constituents of the food are returned to the air by the lungs and skin, or are voided as excrement. That which goes to the air was originally taken from the air by vegetation, and will be so taken again: here is no waste. The excrement contains all that was furnished by the mineral elements of the soil oil which the food was produced. This all passes into the sewers, and is washed into the sea. Its loss to the present generation is complete."
… "30,000,000 bushels of corn contain, among other minerals, nearly 7000 tons of phosphoric acid, and this amount is annually lost in the wasted night-soil of New-York City. [Footnote: Other mineral constituents of food—important ones, too—are washed away in even greater quantities through the same channels; but this element is the best for illustration, because its effect in manure is the most striking, even so small a dressing as twenty pounds per acre, producing a marked effect on all cereal crops. Ammonia, too, which is so important that it is usual in England to estimate the value of manure in exact proportion to its supply of this element, is largely yielded by human excrement.]
"Practically the human excrement of the whole country is nearly all so disposed of as to be lost to the soil. The present population of the United States is not far from 35,000,000. On the basis of the above calculation, their annual food contains 200,000 tons of phosphoric acid, being the amount contained in about 900,000 tons of bones, which, at the price of the best flour of bone, (for manure,) would be worth over $50,000,000. It would be a moderate estimate to say that the other constituents of food are of at least equal value with the other constituents of the bone, and to assume $50,000,000 as the money value of the wasted night-soil of the United States every year.
"In another view, the importance of this waste can not be estimated in money. Money values apply, rather, to the products of labor and to the exchange of these products. The waste of fertilizing matter reaches farther than the destruction or exchange of products: it lessens the ability to produce.
"If mill-streams were failing year by year, and steam were yearly losing force, and the ability of men to labor were yearly growing less, the doom of our prosperity would not be more plainly written, than if this slow but certain impoverishment of our soil were sure to continue.
…. "But the good time is coming, when (as now in China and Japan) men must accept the fact that the soil is not a warehouse to be plundered—only a factory to be worked. Then they will save their raw material, instead of wasting it, and, aided by nature's wonderful laws, will weave over and over again the fabric by which we live and prosper. Men will build up as fast as men destroy; old matters will be reproduced in new forms, and, as the decaying forests feed the growing wood, so will all consumed food yield food again."
With the above brief extract, we shall cease using marks of quotation, as the following information and statements are appropriated bodily, either directly or with mere modifications for brevity, from the little pamphlet of Mr. Waring.
The earth-closet is the invention of the Rev. Henry Moule, of Fordington
Vicarage, Dorsetshire, England.
It is based on the power of clay, and the decomposed organic matter found in the soil, to absorb and retain all offensive odors and all fertilizing matters; and it consists, essentially, of a mechanical contrivance (attached to the ordinary seat) for measuring out and discharging into the vault or pan below a sufficient quantity of sifted dry earth to entirely cover the solid ordure and to absorb the urine.