Additional letters of a physician on the quality of the St Mary's Loch water / by Charles Wilson.

  • Wilson, Charles, 1804-1883.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Additional letters of a physician on the quality of the St Mary's Loch water / by Charles Wilson. 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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    river, and lake waters. “ Spring waters,” he says, u are the best drinking waters, while the ordinary potable well waters are inferior ; but both are, beyond comparison, much superior to both river and lake waters.” To the presence of organic matters, whether vegetable or animal, he attaches great importance as mainly alfecting their salu- briousness ; and here he desires to be especially considered the quantity of the lower vegetable growths and animalcules, their spores and eggs, &c. His views in this respect accord well with the experience of those who have studied the effects of the waters of the jungles of Bengal, the lagoons of Africa, or the marshy tracts of the south of France. He arranges in a table the whole of the 80 waters examined in the order of their excellence. Of 17 spring-waters, having an average hardness of 5.39 per gallon, 13 were good, 2 admissible, and only 2 thoroughly bad. Of 13 lake waters, on the other hand, having an average hardness of 1.96 per gallon, only two were good, 7 were admissible, and 4 were thoroughly bad ; but the very best of his lake waters (Vet- tern) ranks only as 19th, and another portion of it as 29th, on his list, while his good spring waters hold the very foremost places. Of the other lakes instanced in this letter, the Dell lake water stands 38th on the general scale ; the Copenhagen mixed lake and well water ranks as 48th ; and the Lake Malar water, at Stockholm, as 58th, the two latter being estimated even after filtration. Such is the low appreciation of soft lake-water by this able writer, who, to his skill as a chemist, joins the right to speak of health and its laws which belongs to him as a phy- sician : and he further remarks that, wherever such a supply has been extravagantly lauded, it has probably been in the interests of water speculators, who, for the wants of cities, could only provide a soft and limeless water. Such a testimony, proceeding from a country that has produced naturalists like Linnseus, Artedi, Agardh, and Nilson, with chemists like Bergman, Scheele, and Berzelius, and whose men of science are still distinguished for their rare and solid judgment, ought not to fail to receive the highest consideration. In now adducing it, and along with it that of the body of physicians of Sweden, embraced in their Association at Stockholm, who have given to it the sanction of an important prize, and joining it beyond to the previously cited decisions of the Government Commissions of London, Paris, and Vienna, and of the Academy of Medicine of Paris, the question forcibly arises, what probability there can be that so high and so various authorities can be universally in error, and only our Water Trustees, with the scanty scientific support they have been able to muster, can be exceptionally in the right. For my own part, if I trust these, and the many other authorities in whose train I follow, it is not so much because they have won my faith as because they have convinced my judgment. Yet those who have only facts and reasons to offer must know that they are proffering what all do not find alike acceptable or congenial; and that there are many men who are not thinkers, and who throw them- selves open the most readily to mere assertions, that demand from them only assent, and not intelligence. Still, there is pleasure in observing