English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon.
- John Simon
- Date:
- 1897
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: English sanitary institutions : reviewed in their course of development, and in some of their political and social relations / by Sir John Simon. 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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![reach, and which, although it was only for conveyance of stones, Chap. I. Herodotus found not much inferior to the pyramid itself.* Times. It cannot be imagined that, in the days when men first began Early to cluster into the nuclei of future urban life, the object of withmgS district-cleanliness was regarded in the light in which civilised refuse- ° . . matter. and skilled persons now regard it. Various well-known find- ings of modern archaeology—such as the abundant bony remains in the early cave-dwellings of mankind, and the extensive kitchen-middens of early sea-side communities, are the now inodorous skeletons, the mere symbols, of what once must have been frightfully stinking heaps of putrid organic matter in and about the homes of our more remote ancestors ; and no one who studies the past in the present, observing the popular habits which now prevail at a distance from centres of civilisation, will suppose that, in even the denser communities of far-off times of the world, much impulse to scavenging arose either in fasti diousness of the sense of smell, or in apprehensions of danger to health. Movement, languid movement, against indefinite accu- mulations of refuse may nevertheless have had an early beginning in other impulses. Filth and rubbish, when they had accumulated beyond certain limits of quantity within areas of aggregated population, would no doubt have been found mechanically inconvenient, and, if only for that reason, would of course at last have claimed to be removed; but, with regard to some abundant sorts of refuse, prompter removal was often happily promoted by the accident of a second influence. For, from very remote times, the immensely important discovery had been made—(a discovery which even yet has not given to man- kind more than a small share of the benefits which it is capable of yielding)—that animal refuse is wealth in agriculture ;f and * Remains of Cheops's Causeway, and of another, are still existing. See Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, from which I have quoted. t There is incidental mention of doves' dung in the Second Book of Kings, vi, 25 :— There was [? B.C. 893] a great famine in Samaria, and behold they besi i t, u ntil an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver, and the fourth part of a cab of doves' dung for five pieces of silver ; and in this passage the context suggests that perhaps in the crisis the article was in request for human eating; but it is certain that, in early Roman agriculture, doves' dung was among the most admired frecal manures.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21077927_0037.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
