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mean change from impurity to purity, or from worse to better,
but may mean change from better to worse. Of course it is easy
enough to draw frightful word-pictures of the noxious matters
that are permitted to be discharged into a river, the water ot
which, after a certain time, has to be delivered to the public and
used by them for drinking purposes. Alarming such statements
no doubt can be made easily enough—sensational in the extreme
they have been rendered over and over again,—but, nevertheless,
such statements are as unphilosophical as they are sensational.
They seem to overlook, or at any rate to distrust, all those powers
of nature which are continually being exerted to bring about a
change of matter, to bring purity out of impurity, thereby destroying
what is harmful and even rendering it wholesome. For instance,
every human being, with every breath he breathes, discharges into
the atmosphere a vast quantity of decaying and of dead epithelial
scales, and possibly, also, dead particles of tissue. We cannot
prevent this never-ceasing discharge, for it is a law of our existence
that death is only another word for life, and that to live we must
perpetually die. "That which thou sowest is not quickened" (i.e.,
does not live) "except it die." A tissue is formed one day, the
next it dies or is burnt up. Some of the debris finds its way into
the air; this dead material, however, from our lungs, becomes in a
very short time changed and rendered harmless by atmospheric
influences. Because of this constant passage from life to death
it is true that we insist on efficient ventilation; and that we hold
that close courts and cul-de-sacs are improper places for human
habitation: but given the free ventilation of our homes and of our
towns, we trust to the atmosphere to act, not simply mechanically
(for that is only one of its influences), but chemically too, in converting
what was loathsome and disease-producing into products
that are harmless, and which may be re-breathed without fear or
danger. Or again, consider the food of animals: would anyone for
a moment eat pork if they thought of the food of the pigs whilst
doing so? Disgusting that food often is,—"To wallow in the
mire" scarcely expresses all,— and yet that loathsome food of the
pig is converted into flesh by what is called ' a vital agency,' but
which we know to be a chemical agency, until there is produced a
delicious food fit for the use of man and the sustenance of his