The Dwelling House

by George Vivian Poore

It is interesting to note the tendency of organic matter, when mixed with water, to give rise to explosive and combustible products. Explosions in cesspools and sewers have occurred many times. When wet hay is stored in stack it catches fire. When we stir the mud at the bottom of a pond or river, bubbles of combustible marsh-gas rise to the surface. The coal measures are due to the storing under water of semi-aquatic plants which have been preserved by being silted up, and we know that coal is full of olefiant gas, marsh-gas, sulphuretted hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are all combustible, and that the carbonaceous residue, charged with volatile and combustible hydrocarbons, forms the chief fuel of the civilised world. Peat is formed in ways analogous to that of coal, and the so-called mineral oils are certainly the products of organic matter which has been silted up.

These subterranean stores of combustibles, all of organic origin, are, as we know, prodigious in quantity. Nobody can predict the time which it will take to exhaust the coal measures of the world, and we know for a fact that the sacred fires of Baku on the Caspian, fed by subterranean reservoirs of naphtha, have been burning for centuries.

When we see the end of a tin of 'preserved meat' bulged, we know that the gas-forming organisms have been at work within, and when the bed of the lower reaches of the Mississippi rises as a small mud mountain, spluttering with carburetted hydrogen, we know that analogous forces have been in operation. It seems, indeed, to be a law of Nature that the ultimate destiny of organic matter is to 'circulate,' and that if it does not do so quietly, as in the ordinary processes of nutrition in plants and animals, it merely bides its time, and ultimately attains its end with more or less destructive violence.

Nitre (nitrate of potash or nitrate of soda) is an organic product, and sulphur is an essential constituent of all or nearly all organisms. Of the three ingredients of gunpowder, two (charcoal and saltpetre) are, it is certain, of exclusively organic origin, and the third, sulphur, may be so also.

All the common combustibles with which we are familiar are certainly of organic origin, and one is almost forced to the conclusion that in this world life must have preceded combustion. If we are to explain what has been by what is, such a conclusion is irresistible. Are we quite sure that volcanoes, which are seldom far from the sea, are not fed by old deposits of organic matter which has collected in the primeval ocean, and, like the more recent coal measures, have been silted up?

What has been the destiny of the protoplasm of the countless animals and plants which are found in geologic strata? What part have ancient microbes had in the formation and disruption of the successive layers of which this earth is formed? These are questions which force themselves upon the mind, but which I will not attempt to answer. This biological view of the cosmogony which subjects the world, equally with all that is upon it, to the laws of development, evolution, and decay, does not, I believe, present so many difficulties as might at first sight appear.

Omne vivum ex vivo is a law of Nature, and all organic bodies spring from organic antecedents. Organic matter is our capital in this world, and the more frequently we can turn it over, and the more quickly and efficiently we can make it circulate, the more frequent will be our dividends. If we burn organic matter we may get a good dividend of energy, but nothing further is to be expected. The construction of the furnace involves an outlay of capital, which steadily diminishes as the furnace wears out by frequent use. If we burn organic matter merely to be rid of it, we spend our money for the sole purpose of dissipating our capital. The function of fire is to destroy and sterilise.

If we mix organic matter with large quantities of water, we have to encounter all the evils and annoyance of putrefaction, and if, when so mixed, we send it to the sea, we have no material gain of any kind. We spend our money for the purpose of dissipating our capital.

We may place the water containing the organic matter upon the land, and in tropical countries this is done, with excellent effect, for the production of rice, a semi-aquatic plant, which, according to Professor Georgeson, Professor of Agriculture in the Imperial University of Tokio, is said to prefer its nitrogen in the form of ammonia. The same authority states that nitrification does not take place under water, and careful experiments carried out at Tokio show that sulphate of ammonia is a much better manure for irrigated rice than nitrate of soda.

In our damp climate sewage farming has proved a dismal failure, and the difficulties seem to increase with the quantity of water which has to be dealt with. Excess of water drowns the humus, and nitrification cannot go on in a soil the pores of which are closed by excess of moisture.