The return is of the stock annually sold in Smithfield-market, and includes not only English but foreign beasts, sheep, and calves; the latter averaging weekly in 1848 (the latest return then published), beasts, 590; sheep, 2478; and calves, 248.
| 224,000 | horned cattle. | |
| 1,550,000 | sheep. | |
| 27,300 | calves. | |
| 40,000 | pigs. | |
| Total | 1,841,300. |
I may remark that this is not a criterion of the consumption of animal food in the metropolis, for there are, besides the above, the daily supplies from the country to the “dead salesmen.” The preceding return, however, is sufficient for my present purpose, which is to show the quantity of cattle manure “dropped” in London.
The number of cattle entering the metropolis, then, are 1,841,300 per annum.
The number of horses daily traversing the metropolis has been already set forth. By a return obtained by Mr. Charles Cochrane from the Stamp and Tax Office, we have seen that there are altogether
| In London and Westminster, of private carriage, job, and cart horses | 10,022 |
| Cab horses | 5,692 |
| Omnibus horses | 5,500 |
| Horses daily coming to metropolis | 3,000 |
| Total number of horses daily in London | 24,214 |
The total here given includes the returns of horses which were either taxed or the property of those who employ them in hackney-carriages in the metropolis. But the whole of these 24,214 horses are not at work in the streets every day. Perhaps it might be an approximation to the truth, if we reckoned five-sixths of the horses as being worked regularly in the public thoroughfares; so that we arrive at the conclusion that 20,000 horses are daily worked in the metropolis; and hence we have an aggregate of 7,300,000 horses traversing the streets of London in the twelvemonth. The beasts, sheep, calves, and pigs driven and conveyed to and from Smithfield are, we have seen, 1,841,300 in number. These, added together, make up a total of 9,141,300 animals appearing annually in the London thoroughfares. The circumstance of Smithfield cattle-market being held but twice a week in no way detracts from the amount here given; for as the gross number of individual cattle coming to that market in the course of the year is given, each animal is estimated as appearing only once in the metropolis.
The next point for consideration is—what is the quantity of dung dropped by each of the above animals while in the public thoroughfares?
Concerning the quantity of excretions passed by a horse in the course of 24 hours there have been some valuable experiments made by philosophers whose names alone are a sufficient guarantee for the accuracy of their researches.
The following Table from Boussingault’s experiments is copied from the “Annales de Chimie et de Physique,” t. lxxi.