River water (no. 2) : a reply to Dr. Frankland / by Charles Meymott Tidy.

  • Charles Meymott Tidy
Date:
1881
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: River water (no. 2) : a reply to Dr. Frankland / by Charles Meymott Tidy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    mul the Dftrwen. The total number of observations on these rivers for the purpose of disproving the then accepted theory were five in number. First of all, I should wish to know how the samples were collected ? Were they simply single samples of the water of the river, because if so (and I have Dr. Frankland’s authority in his criticisms on my samples for saving this), they are of very little value. On this point Dr. Frankland is silent, I happen to know all three of these rivers well, and I confess, three rivers more pre-eminently ill-fitted for experiments of this nature, it seems to me, it would be impossible to find. The constant inflow of polluted matter into these rivers along their course is well shown by Dr. Frankland’s own experiments. Thus in the Irwell, after an eleven miles run. Dr. Frankland finds an actual increase in the organic elements present, in one case the organic carbon rising from 2T5 to 2‘37 per 100,000 parts, and in a second the organic nitrogen rising from 0'248 to 0'304. In the third Irwell ex- periment the organic nitrogen is also recorded as undergoing a slight increase. And these are the only three experiments recorded on the Irwell. I can scarcely believe Dr. Frankland’s antipathy to the notion of water improving by the flow of a few miles would lead him to suggest that it deteriorates unless by the reception of fresh impurities. But, says Dr. Frankland, ‘ you must not interpret these results too strictly.’ I was curious to understand the exact meaning Dr. Frank- land attached to that phrase, and this was not far to seek. In one experiment on the Irwell recorded by Dr. Frankland, the organic carbon, after a run of eleven miles, decreased from 2T34 to 1'502, or by nearly 30 per cent. In the observation on the Mersey the organic elements decreased from 0'815 to 0’648, or by 21 per cent., whilst in the case of the Darwen they decreased from 2’422 to F430, or by 41 per cent., this latter experiment having been made in the cold month of March. I have now referred to the whole of Dr. Frankland’s experiments on these three rivers. But I venture to think that these observations, pre-eminently successful as I regard them in proof of the possibility of a river water regaining purity in the course of its flow, Dr. Frank- land will admit are scarcely illustrations of what I mean. A sewage water represented by 2'352, 2'394, 2‘373, and 2'422 of organic elements per 100,000 can hardly be regarded as a sewage freely diluted, and that these highly contaminated waters should undergo a process of purification to the extent that Dr. Frankland’s experiments indicate, is singularly satisfactory. But there is another point about these rivers which I should have dwelt upon more fully had not Dr. Frankland himself, as a faithful recorder, done so. I will quote his own words (“ Sixth Report,” p. 135) : “The rivers upon which they [these experiments] were made are notoricnisly much polluted by sewage and other refuse organic mailers.
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