View report page

58
WATER-SUPPLY.
visceral obstructions; that it diminishes the natural
secretions, produces a constipated or irregular state
of the bowels, and consequently deranges the health.
He had repeatedly known these complaints to vanish
on leaving the town, and to re-appear immediately
on returning to it, and it was such repeated occurrences
which fixed his attention on the hard selenitic
water of the new red sandstone as the probable
cause, as he believed it to be, of these affections."
(Rep. p. 51.) And Dr. Leach of Glasgow stated
before the same Board, as the result in that town
of two years experience of a substitution of soft for
hard drinking-water, that, in his opinion, "dyspeptic
complaints had become diminished in number
and that it had "been observed, since this change,
urinary diseases have become less frequent, especially
those attended by the deposition of gravel."
Inferences useful for ourselves cannot be drawn
from statements like the above, on the fullest assumption
of their accuracy, without comparing the
waters referred to with our own, more completely
than is done by the one characteristic of "hardness
and there may likewise be other qualifications
requisite for an application of the analogy.
But those disorders of health which are specified
by the gentlemen quoted, as produced by the use
and diminished by the disuse of hard waters, are
such as might very probably stand in the relation
of effect to their alleged cause; results, namely, primary
and secondary, of disordered digestion.