Report of the Medical commission upon the sanitary qualities of the Sudbury, Mystic, Shawshine, and Charles River waters.

  • Boston (Mass.). Medical Commission on Sanitary Qualities of the River Waters.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report of the Medical commission upon the sanitary qualities of the Sudbury, Mystic, Shawshine, and Charles River waters. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    is to keep all this filth out by perfect sewerage. (See report of Mystic Water Board on this subject, City Doc. No. 94.) Chemical Composition. — There are so many sources of pollution upon the banks of this proposed source of water- supply, both of the nature of objectionable kinds of manu- factories, and of a thickly settled population, that the chemical analysis of the majority of the specimens [Table III.] showed a very dirty condition. TABLE III. —Mystic River-[Parts per 100,000]. oj = a o 2 '5 ■a 0) Date. Locality. a a < a-a 32 6 '3 OS a o « a a a 3 <^a 5 &3 ca _o & ft : < M o> H O 27 Sept. 17 Abajonna River, above Burbank's 0.016 8.0 4.0 12.0 1.8 28 17 Cummings' Brook,1 Unfiltered . . 0.1330 0.050 10.4 18.0 2S.4 10.4 Filtered . . 0.1330 0.028 9.0 16.4 25.4 10.4 W ii !7 586.2 595.0 76.6 53.8 662.8 648.8 346.0 0.240 346.0 30 27 Abajonna River, above Mystic Lake 0.0080 0.023 8.0 7.2 15.2 4.1 81 ii 17 Mystic Lake at Gate House . . . 0.0084 0.023 5.0 9.4 14.4 2.6 35 Oct. 26 Abajonna River, above Chemical Works in North Woburn . . . 0.0010 0.011 3.0 2.4 5.4 0.8 1 Below Cummings' tannery. 2 On Main St., near the ice-house track, below all the tanneries. The sample (No. 35) collected at the head of the Aba- jonna, above all sources of-pollution, has a composition as good as that of any of the other streams; but a short dis- tance lower down, at a point just above Burbank's pond, the amount of impurities is nearly doubled. During the analysis of the Cummings'-brook specimen, which was collected a short distance below Cum miners' tan-
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