Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEWAGE DISINFECTION. IN A recent report by the Metropolitan Sewage Commission of the City of New York Dr. Soper, the president, informs us that the daily flow of the 600,000,000 gallons of sewage of that city, would fill the Flatiron Building every 46 minutes, and if the suspended matters were concentrated into a thick sludge, a volume equal to that of the Flatiron Building would have to be discharged twice a week into New York Bay. In dry substance this sludge is reported to consist of (annually in tons): Feces 77,600 Toilet papers and newspapers 44,300 Soap and washings 60,900 Street wastes 44,300 Miscellaneous 22,200 What becomes of this stupendous volume of filth? By what benevolent agency have we been enabled to pour this stream with its tons of putrescent matter day after day and year after year, into New York Bay, and withal find that in very existence disappears from our sight? New York Harbor is as clean today as it was twenty years ago. Why? As a matter of fact, a satisfactory answer, as to what becomes of the enormous quantities of human waste, is now at hand, though strange to say, it could not have been furnished as recently as five or ten years ago. Liebig, who dominated chemical thought during the middle of last century, described and ridiculed Pasteur's great discovery of anaerobic fermentation. Yet the remarkable efficiency of destroying organic matter by anaerobic action was the underlying principle of the first sewage-disposal contrivance based on bacterial action. This invention of Mouras, a Frenchman, whose American patent of November 28, 1882 (U. S. Pat. No. 268120), although preceded by 20 years' practical use for an "Automatic Scavenger," permits sewage, kitchen waste and the like to be madeto liquefy in an air-tight, hermet...