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15
ing pure filtered water, would also be a valuable addition to
(the comfort and health of the inhabitants, especially in the
summer time.
Ventilation of Sewhus.
The offensive smell from ventilating shafts in the roads, and
from gullies when the water has escaped from the traps in dry
weather, has been frequently a subject of complaint. This
offensive smell would not be so much occasioned by fresh
sewage, but in this district, like many other progressive
districts, new sowers frequently receive the contents of old
drains connected with cesspools or masses of putrefactive decomposition,
and thence the effluvium is worse than it otherwise
would be.
Hut the ventilation of sewers is of the utmost importance
to health.
It has been proved (by Dr. Sanderson) that in the interior
of houses where fires are kept, a continued diminution of the
pressure of the atmosphere takes place, and there is a continual
pouring into the house of sewer gas; the means of entry being
through water-closets, waste pipes to cisterns, sinks, and drains
in the house.
The closing of ventilating shafts would therefore assist in
forcing into houses a deadly supply of sewer gas, and would
render the sewer unsafe for any workmen to enter it for the
purposes of cleansing or repair.
The means of remedying the offensive smell from these sewer
openings or ventilating shafts, would be either by dry charcoal
gratings, or by chimneys erected against some building
and communicating with the sewer, and so high that the gases
would be thrown out of reach, and oxidized by the atmosphere.
But as impure air, like impure water, though sometimes
slow (unless concentrated) is always certain in producing its
pernicious effects, in my opinion no system of drainage can
be perfect which admits the possibility of the entry of sewer
gas into the house, and no house can be wholesome in which
the entry of fresh air and the exit of foul air is not provided
for.
Sewer gas may enter dwelling houses in several ways, as
before mentioned, viz., by water-closets and soil pipes, waste
pipes to water cisterns which communicate with the closet
pipe or with the sewer, by sinks, which are always msufficienty
trapped, in which the trap is frequently removed,
or by drain pipes under houses insufficiently cemented.