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and the valve-closet cannot be properly flushed by a tank, as
required by the 21st regulation, or that closets of these
pattern are very numerous. The flush-tank is properly
applicable to the cases (also very numerous), where basins of
the hopper and wash-out variety are employed. The additional
consumption of water that would be entailed by the
substitution of the three-gallon for the two-gallon flush, has
therefore, been over estimated by the Companies, whose
opposition to the proposed alteration of the regulation, so far
as it was concerned with the question of supply, was not
improbably, dictated by a benevolent desire to aid the East
London Water Company, in regard to difficulties which will,
ere long, be a thing of the past.
I need hardly say, perhaps, that I adhere to the opinion
expressed in previous reports, that it would be well were
express power given to the Sanitary Authorities, enabling them
to enforce such of the regulations as have a distinctly sanitary
bearing, including the 14th regulation, which makes provision
for the abolition of waste-pipes connecting cisterns with drains,
and the substitution therefor of warning-pipes ; a regulation
which the Companies do not appear to have systematically
enforced. It would be well, moreover, if a regulation were
made forbidding the connection, which is so often found to
exist, of a common water supply for general domestic purposes,
and for the service of the water closet, without the intervention
of a flushing-tank.
Professor E. Frankland's Report.—The report on the
" Chemical, Physical and Bacterioscopic Examination of the
Waters supplied by the Metropolitan Water Companies during
the year 1895," by Professor Frankland, appended to the
Registrar-General's Annual Summary, states that " the raw
material operated upon by the Companies drawing their
supplies from rivers . . . was much more favourable for