Sir George Staunton has pronounced some of the tea-growing parts of China to be as blooming as an English nobleman’s flower-garden. Every jot of manure, human ordure, and all else, is minutely collected, even by the poorest.
I have already given a popular account of the composition of the metropolitan sewage, &c. (under the head of Wet Refuse), and I now give its scientific analysis.
In some districts the sewage is more or less liquid—in what proportion has not been ascertained—and I give, in the first place, an analysis of the sewage of the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer, Westminster, the result having been laid before a Committee of the House of Commons. As the contents of the great majority of sewers must be the same, because resulting from the same natural or universally domestic causes (as in the refuse of cookery, washing, surface-water, &c.), the analysis of the sewage of the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer may be accepted as one of sewer-matter generally.
Evidence was given before the committee as to the proportion of “land-drainage water” to what was really manure, in the matter derived from the sewer in question. A produce of 140 grains of manure was derived from a gallon of sewer-water. Messrs. Brande and Cooper, the analyzers, also state that one gallon (10 lbs.?) of the liquid portion of the sewage, evaporated to dryness, gave 85·3 grains of solid matter, 74·8 grains of which was again soluble, and contained—
| Ammonia | 3·29 |
| Sulphuric acid | 0·62 |
| Phosphate of lime | 0·29 |
| Lime | 6·25 |
| Chlorine | 10·00 |
“and potass and soda, with a large quantity of soluble and vegetable matter, and 10·54 insoluble.”
This insoluble portion consisted of
| Phosphate of lime | 2·32 |
| Carbonate of lime | 1·94 |
| Silica | 6·28 |
| 10·54 |
The deposit from another gallon weighed 55 grains, of which 21·22 were combustible, being composed of animal matter “rich in nitrogen,” some vegetable matter, and a quantity of fat. Of this matter 33·75 grains consisted of
| Phosphate of lime | 6·81 |
| Oxide of iron | 2·01 |
| Carbonate of lime | 1·75 |
| Sulphate of lime | 1·53 |
| Earthy matter and sand | 21·65 |
| 33·75 |