A digest of facts relating to the treatment and utilization of sewage / by W.H. Corfield.

  • Corfield, W. H. (William Henry), 1843-1903.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A digest of facts relating to the treatment and utilization of sewage / by W.H. Corfield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which can lift 2,000 gallons a minute to a height of 20 feet—obviously more than enough for the amount above given, and this is to allow for storm-water. The sewage is then pumped up to the highest point of the land to be irrigated, and here, as may be seen at Warwick, there is no necessity for a storing reservoir. We have thus seen the sewage, filtered or not, delivered on to the farm in one or two ways; it now remains to consider the most suitable manner of spreading it over the ground. The most obvious way is that of the Marcite meadows at Milan, namely, to let it run everywhere, in fact to produce water meadows, separated from the land around by a bank. The disadvantages of this plan agriculturally are, that it water-logs the soil, and that it is not suitable to all crops, injuring the upper parts of the plants; neither Snbmer. does it allow of intermittent downward filtration, which f^ot admits air, so essential to the growth of plants and to tageou3. the purification of the sewage itself, especially when the land is fallow; so that the effluent water would not be purified at all times, as we have seen that it is not, by continuous downward filtration. It has been pro- posed also to carry the sewage to the plants by subter- ranean irrigation; that is to say, by porous pipes' laid deep enough in the ground to be out of the way of the plough : and indeed it is suggested that sometimes the ordinary drainage pipes may be used for this purpose by stopping up their outlets during the time that the irrigation is going on. This method is so obviously a Subter- bad one that it scarcely requires anv further remarks Fanean mi , . , , J irrigation liie sewage is sent into the ground below the roots very bad of the plants instead of among and above them, as it