View report page

62
total average flow would often only slightly exceed the
amount of water required by the Companies, and in such a case
as that of September, 1893, the total flow would not come up to
the requirements. If the extreme minimum flow per twenty-four
hours is taken, the difficulty of providing a supply both for the
River and the Metropolis is still more apparent.
There is a good deal of common sense in some of the
remarks in the reports about the safety, or otherwise, of polluted
waters. Sir A. R. Binnie draws attention to the fact that " the
Royal Commissioners received, although they do not quote it, some
very strong evidence from one of the highest authorities,
namely, Sir G. Buchanan, M.D., F.R.S., late Chief Medical
Officer to the Local Government Board." This evidence was
to the effect that neither chemical nor bacteriological tests were
to be relied on as to the purity of water, that we did not know
how small an amount of morbific material, if it gained access to
the water, might set up disease, and that the way to gain
information as to purity and safety was to search out the
conditions surrounding water courses and water services. Asked
what would be his treatment of the water if it were found to be
polluted, he could only answer that " there was nothing for it but
either to boil the polluted water, or else to leave it alone."
In face of such evidence from such an authority we turn
with interest to the paragraphs in Sir A. R. Binnie's report summarising
the pollutions of the Thames water, which the Commission
thinks good enough for London. It seems that at the census of
1891 there was a population of 1,056,415 persons draining into
the river above the intakes, and that in the last thirty years this
population had increased from 816,814 to its present number.
That, however, gives but a poor idea of the increase which is
going on in the urban population living on the banks of the
Thames and its Tributaries, many of these towns having more
than doubled their size in thirty years. "Besides this human
population there are probably 1,600,000 animals inhabiting the