View report page

35
DRAINAGE.
is connected with the presence of cesspools beneath
houses, and which depends on their poisonous
emanations. At the commencement of the present
year, your Surveyor stated that he might take
"5414, as a fair approximation of the number of
cesspools" then in existence within the square mile
of the City of London. This proportion, dangerously
large as without doubt it is, presented an
important diminution from the number which existed
a year previously, when your Commission first
obtained from the Legislature authority to enforce
their closure; and it may reasonably be anticipated
that at the termination of this present year, a still
further abatement will be recorded in the magnitude
of that destructive nuisance.
3. Notwithstanding the variety of stink-traps to
which you have given trial, and notwithstanding the
fact (recorded by your Committee of Health on the
Surveyor's authority) that "there does not exist
within your jurisdiction a single gully which is untrapped,"
there continue to be frequent complaints
of offensive exhalations from the sewers.
The mechanical difficulties in this matter of trapping
have appeared to be, from the nature of the
case, almost insuperable. It may, indeed, easily be
conceived, how incompatible are the common uses
of a gully-hole with such fineness of adjustment
and delicacy of balance as would render the apparatus
air-tight from within, and effectually preclude