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out by the subsequent investigations made by that gentleman,
and by Professor Frankland. In the report of
Captain Tyler, May, 1871, it is intimated that he has
abundant evidence before him of the Southwark and Vauxhall
Company having long possessed the means of admitting
tidal water direct from the Thames at Battersea into
their reservoir: and further, that one of these reservoirs,
when emptied for his (Captain Tyler's) examination, was
found to be the very reverse of impervious (as it was
alleged to have been) to soakage or precolation of impure
tidal water at that point.
Captain Tyler, after alluding to the evidence of the
Officers of Health and others, which he took on the 20th
of December, 1870, and on the 3rd and 17th of January,
1871, gives the result of his own inspections of the reservoirs,
and also his views of the several analyses conducted
by Professor Frankland. The conclusions which he came
to are well summed up in the last paragraph of this full
and very interesting report, wherein it is stated that the
"positive evidence" he (Captain Tyler) had received could
not but throw" grave suspicions on the Company's proceedings."
Whether the promise will be fully carried out
on the part of the Company, to take immediate steps to
preclude all suspicion of what Captain Tyler very properly
terms "the wrong doing" of the Company for the future,
remains to be seen; but it is right it should be known
that Professor Frankland, in his May report of the present
year, speaks of the Water supplied by the Southwark
Company as being not only slightly turbid but containing
moving organisms visible to the naked eye. "The best
sample," says the Professor (26th May, 1871), "was that
drawn from the West Middlesex Company's Main, and the
worst that delivered by the Southwark and Vauxhall
Company."
The substitution of a constant for the present intermittent
supply of water to the inhabitants of this District,
is being still looked forward to as a boon which, it is hoped,