THE DOMESTIC FILTER IN USE
Unless the sand and charcoal in the glass bulb is very frequently cleaned, it serves merely as a "catch-all" for impurities, through which the water must flow.
Domestic Filters. Much the same must be said of private or domestic filters. These are, at best, temporary substitutes, and should not be depended upon for permanent use. Many of them are made to sell rather than to purify, and will remove only the larger or mechanical impurities from the water. Others, while they work well at first, are exceedingly likely to become clogged, when the tendency is to punch at them to make them work faster, thus either poking a hole through them or cracking the filter-shell, so that a stream of water flows steadily through, just as impure as when it entered. Private filters, like boiling water, are only temporary ways of meeting conditions which ought not to be allowed to exist at all in civilized communities, or in your own homes.
A score of court decisions in all parts of the world have now held that the water company is legally responsible for all avoidable pollution of public water-supplies, and nine tenths of pollutions are avoidable.
CHAPTER X
BEVERAGES, ALCOHOL, AND TOBACCO
The Popularity of Beverages. For some curious reason, the habit has grown up of taking a large part of the six glasses of water that we require daily in the form of mixtures known as beverages. These beverages are always much more expensive than pure water; are often quite troublesome to secure and prepare; have little, or no, food value; are of doubtful value even in small amounts; and injurious in large ones. Why they should ever have come into such universal use, in all races and in all ages of the world, is one of the standing puzzles of human nature. They practically all consist of from ninety to ninety-eight per cent of water, the food elements that may be added to them being in such trifling amounts as to be practically of no value. They serve no known useful purpose in the body, save as a means of introducing the water which they contain; and yet mankind has used them ever since the dawn of history.