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skirt the banks. And this littoral population, it must be borne in mind, is exposed
not only to the malaria arising from the banks, but also to that same class of
pernicious influences attached to bad sites and badly constructed houses, which are
found alone sufficient to generate fever elsewhere. Few of the seamen who fill the
medical deck of the Dreadnought have contracted their illness on the river under
circumstances which can be connected with the state of its waters; and of these
few, it will be found that the illness of most can be traced to cold, wet, exhaustion,
bad food, and over-crowding in the close ill-ventilated forecastles of unhealthy ships.
Most erroneous assumptions still continue to guide the exertions of those who are
most earnest in favour of the present scheme for what is called the dispollution
of the Thames, within the metropolitan boundary ; and very exaggerated sanitary
results are anticipated from the execution of this scheme. A misapprehension of
the true meaning of an expression used by Professor Faraday has led to much
confusion. When this celebrated chemist described in an often-quoted letter to the
Times, the " clouds of feculence" rolling in the river, and dilated in graphic language
upon the opaque turbidity of the stream, he was too hastily understood to
mean that these " clouds" and this turbidity, were nothing more nor less than
sewage-matter. So far is this inference from being true, those clouds of
so-called " feculence" are important agents in the purification of the Thames.
Almost the whole of that matter which renders the river turbid, is earthy
detritus—clay and silex, washed down from its banks and water-shed; or raised
from its bed, and suspended in the mass of flowing waters in fine particles. This
inorganic matter attracts and entangles the sewage-substances as these mingle
with the stream. It thus exerts a powerful disinfecting and decomposing action
on the organic matter. A series of observations, as yet incomplete, which I have
made upon the waters of the Thames, taken at different periods of the tide, from
alongside the Dreadnought, affords sufficient proof of the accuracy of these statements.
The Thames is never so muddy, so turbid, or so opaque, as during the
flood and high-water, precisely when it contains the minimum of sewage-matter;
during the flood, the water contains a large quantity of inorganic mud, much
common salt, and sulphates, and but a small proportion of organic matter, either
in an unconverted form or in the form of animalcules and protophytes; at lowwater,
on the other hand, when there is the maximum of sewage, the water is often
almost bright, yielding comparatively little earthy deposit. At this time, even at