Hints to househunters and householders / by Ernest Turner.

  • Turner, Ernest.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hints to househunters and householders / by Ernest Turner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    in returning the poison we have committed to its keeping. Cesspools and drains are the principal agents in this procedure, and their agency is dealt with in chapter vii. Or, possibly, as pointed out in the preceding chapter, an artificially poisoned soil may have been carefully provided by the original owner of the estate. Bear in mind, therefore, that the indications of the Geological Survey Map are not necessarily conclusive as to the actual soil. And, finally, the poison may have been provided by a neighbour. Air currents do not travel through the soil as rapidly as over it; but they travel just as surely. And the more naturally wholesome the soil —such as gravel or sand—the more readily they penetrate it. So the poisoned air from a cesspool, or drain-polluted patch, a score of houses off may find its way underground, and so into your basement and your lungs, be your own drainage system as perfect as it may. And the moral of this is: keep out all ground air from the house. Never build—or at all events never for your own use—a house without a solid substratum of impervious concrete under the whole of it, and extending some little distance beyond the walls on every side. Soil also contains water. Chalk holds from 13 to 17 per cent.; clay, unless of a very stiff kind, 20 per cent.; and humus or mould 40 to 60 per cent. The only soils that contain no