Water supply : considered mainly from a chemical and sanitary standpoint / by Wm. Ripley Nichols.

  • Nichols, Wm. Ripley (William Ripley), 1847-1886.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Water supply : considered mainly from a chemical and sanitary standpoint / by Wm. Ripley Nichols. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that the vegetable refuse from certain manufacturing operations may be very offensive: such, for instance, is the refuse from starch factories, the water in which flax has been retted, etc. That such water would be unfit to drink, unless enormously diluted, one can hardly doubt. To quote again from Professor Mallet: If the theory be accepted, which has so much in its favor, attributing the production of disease by organic matter in drink- ing water not to any specifically poisonous substance or substances, but to the presence and action of living organisms, it seems quite conceivable that a water containing organic matter of any kind, including vegetable matter, may be harmless at one time, and harmful at another, when perhaps a different stage of fermenta- tion or putrefactive change may have been entered upon, and special organisms may have made their appearance or entered upon a new phase of existence. Thus, there might possibly be safety in drinking a peaty water, or water filtered through beds of dead forest leaves, when fresh ; danger when, after a certain amount of atmospheric exposure, bacterial organisms had become developed; and safety again, perhaps, after the growth of such organisms had fallen off, and more or less of the available organic matter had been consumed. However views may differ as to the possible injury from this or that particular form of contamination, we are safe in accepting the two following principles as fundamental guides in the selec- tion of a water for water supply : 1. A water suitable for domestic supply must be free from all substances which are blown to produce an injurious effect on the human system, or which are suspected with good reason, or on good authority, to produce such an effect. 2. The water should be, as far as practicable, free from all substances and from all associations which offend the general aesthetic sense of the community, and thus affect the system through the imagination, even if there is good reason to suppose that it is in itself perfectly harmless. The first of these principles needs no argument to justify it; with reference to the second, a word or two may be said. Dr. Emmerich, even, admits that not every one could drink dilute sewage as he did, because the mere idea of so doing, or the sight of a floating hair or other unattractive object, would no doubt