Colonial and camp sanitation / [George Vivian Poore].

  • Poore, George Vivian, 1843-1904
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Colonial and camp sanitation / [George Vivian Poore]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    prevent the access of diptera, or burying it immediately beneath the surface of well-tilled soil with a view to the production of crops. We pity the horse ‘ turned out ’ in a paddock when we see it tormented with ‘ flies.’ Few of us pause to think that if the horsedung had been collected daily and put to more profitable use instead of being allowed to lie about and generate a plague of flies the animal might have been happier and the dung might have been more valuable for fer¬ tilising purposes. When flies breed in dung-heaps the larvae eat the dung and leave the straw. If each fly needs one grain only of sustenance then the 25,000,000 which I have stated as the possible season’s progeny of a female house-fly will be capable of robbing a farmer of 25,000,000 grains of fertilising material, which at 7,000 grains to the pound works out at 8,571 pounds, or considerably more than one and a half tons. It is bad economy to have your scavenging done by flies and sad to see your potential wealth make to itself wings and fly away. In my garden at Andover where human excreta have undergone daily superficial burial for about eighteen years there is no excess of flies, and I have come to the conclusion that an essential part of garden management is the daily collection of all garden offal, such as dead leaves, fallen and rotten fruit, &c., and either superficially burying or stacking it so that it shall not serve as a breeding-ground for insects which often prey upon the plums and peaches in the autumn. In the management of refuse I am no advocate for the use of chemical disinfectants. These are expensive, generally evil* smelling, often poisonous, and lead to an increase of material to be transported. The soil is quite capable, with proper management, of turning all organic refuse into ‘ soil ’—& fact which the experiments of Sir