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the only manufacturer of artificial manure remaining at the close of 1856, has, in
accordance with an order of the magistrate, which followed the infliction of a doubled
penalty, ceased to manufacture. The principal causes of nuisance, therefore, now are
the varnish factories and fat melters. Several cases have been taken to the police
court during the year, under my certificate, in accordance with the 27th section of the
Nuisances Removal Act. In the last alone a conviction was not obtained. It was the
fourth occasion on which the proprietor of a boiling-house for condemned meat had
been summoned on account of the intolerable nuisance which his negligent mode of
conducting his business gave rise to. A fat melter, in adjoining premises, was summoned
at the same time, and, as each case had to be heard separately, the evidence
failed to show which was producing the offensive smell for which both were summoned.
Even where convictions have been obtained, the penalties inflicted at the police court
have not sufficed to render the manufacturers careful not to incur them. In proof
that varnish making, the manufacture of enamel black, &c., may be carried on
without the production of the most insignificant amount of offensive effluvium, I may
refer to the largest works of the kind in the parish, those of Messrs. Wilkinson and
Heywood, in Caledonia-place.
30. I have been asked so often by different members of the vestry, whether I consider
these offensive effluvia injurious to health, that I feel under some sort of obligation
to express my opinion upon the subject, and I do not know that a better opportunity
than the present is likely to occur. When I reply, that I do, it is necessary
that I should explain myself more fully; and especially as I cannot but infer, from
observations that have fallen from some, whose anxiety to ascertain the truth is most
apparent, that they have a very obscure idea themselves of the meaning to be attached
to the phrase they employ " injurious to health." Now it is not to be supposed that this
term implies or need imply the direct production of fever, measles, hooping cough,
erysipelas, or any other form of zymotic or acute disease in those who are exposed
to these effluvia, in the diluted form in which they reach the neighbouring habitations.
This is not even the ordinary or conventional meaning of the phrase, much less its
scientific meaning. Nothing would be more absurd than to attribute to them the
direct production of such results as these, or to look for proof of their deleterious influence
to the prevalence in the neighbourhood of acute or zymotic maladies. To
assert, however, that they are not "injurious to health," in the sense that they do not
assist in effecting that deterioration of the powers of life, which every dweller in
London, or in any large town, is cognizant of in his own person, that lowering of
vital force, which drives a man, periodically, into the purer atmosphere of the country
for a period of renovation, and, unhappily, leads many, who cannot compass this
luxury, to the use of alcoholic stimulants to counteract their operation, would be to
deny the evidence of one's own experience, and the plainest inferences of one's own
reason. The atmosphere which enters our lungs, and whose more important elements
are carried to every portion of our frame, cannot receive additions foreign to its
natural composition, without the latter exerting some influence upon the frame.
Unless then we are prepared to allow that this influence is a favourable one, (a view
which I suppose no one would gravely maintain,) the only alternative must be accepted,—namely,
that however tardy their operation, however imperceptible the
encroachment upon the powers of the system, even though no more definite result
ensues than that general curtailment of life, which is observed in a town compared
with a country population; nevertheless, these foreign constituents are not innocuous.
I cannot allow any exception to this rule in favour of offensive trades. I
am perfectly aware of the objection to which this mode of reasoning is exposed. It
may be demanded of me to prove that, amid all the exhalation from sewers, cesspools,
and undrained land, the trade effluvia in question, rising into an atmosphere already
fouled by the smoke from above 300,000 dwellings, have actually produced the results
attributed to them, have acted to reduce vitality, and have shortened life in their neighbourhoods.
Now, I at once, repudiate the justice of this claim. The operation of
such effluvia I have asserted to be a chronic one, and, therefore, impossible thus to