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tioned like that in St. James's-square. There can be no
doubt, moreover, that danger to the public health is involved
in circumstances which tend to retard the flow of water by
dead-ends of mains. The engineer stated that the Company
were, and for some time past had been, engaged in abolishing the
dead-ends, and it is to be hoped that the recent stir will have the
desired effect of stimulating their activity in this direction.
Sir Edward Frankland had occasion, not long since, to direct
attention to the ill effects of dead-ends of mains, in a report
on the water supply at Paisley, where an epidemic of enteric
fever was probably due to a gross defect in the apparatus for
flushing dead-ends.* The conclusions of this analyst with
reference to dead ends, as set out in his report on the Paisley
case, are as follows :—
" i. That chemical analysis has shown the water in the dead ends of the
mains to be organically somewhat inferior to that circulating in the
trunk mains, both of the high and low level services.
" 2. That the bacteriological examination has shewn the water in the
dead ends of the mains to be, in almost every case, somewhat richer
in bacterial life than the water circulating in the large mains of both
supplies.
" 3. That colon bacilli, and other forms more or less resembling the
typhoid bacilli, have been found in six of the twelve samples collected
from the taps in the affected area, whilst no suspicious forms
were discoverable in the two samples taken from the trunk mains.
" 4. That all the four samples taken from plugs inserted in the dead ends
of mains in the affected area contained colon bacilli.
" 5. That whilst the results referred to above do not actually prove a connection
between the water supply and the recent epidemic, they are
obviously quite in harmony with the existence of such a connection.
*The defect referred to consisted in the "system which prevails in
Paisley of making a direct connection between the water mains and
the sewers," described by Sir Edward Frankland as one of the most
serious breaches of the laws of hygiene" which he had met with in
the whole course of his experience, "and which it is impossible to
condemn in sufficiently strong terms,"