Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/882

862 impossible to determine upon a method to be substituted for it. The commission have decided that the sewage had best be got rid of at the smallest cost compatible with efficiency. The suspended solid matters are the chief causes of nuisance: they may be almost entirely removed, and the tendency to the accumulation of deposits largely lessened, by precipitation; but the result of discharging an effluent alkalized by lime into the river at the present outfalls is problematical. Precipitation alone would not finally purify the river, but nuisances would still occur in dry weather, and the danger to fish and injury to wells would remain. The precipitation works themselves might be carried on without sensible nuisance at a cost of $1,000,000, or a shilling a head of the population per year, but practically a large part of the value of the sewage for manure would be lost. From two to six thousand acres of land would be required for the further purification of the sewage by being passed through it, after having been clarified with lime. The conclusion of the whole matter is, that while profit must not be expected from the utilization of sewage, yet precipitation and utilization are eminently fitted, when properly applied, to produce a purified effluent; and therefore, that, were certain conditions of population and of sewage always observed, each district could be made self-contained in respect of its sewage, just as it can be in respect of its cemetery. The condition as to population is that the district be limited in numbers and in the area occupied. The conditions as to the sewage are, the extent to which it can be separated from the rainfall, and the degree of freshness in which it is received at the place where it is treated,

Formosan Sketch.—Mr. E. Colborne Baker, in the Royal Geographical Society, compared the shape of the Island of Formosa to that of a fish. If he likened it to a whale, he said, although he must confess it was not very like a whale, he might be asked to account for the blow-holes of the creature. Those blow-holes actually exist in the north part of the island, in the shape of sulphur pits and caverns, from which a great stream of sulphurous vapor is continually spouting in many parts. Her Britannic Majesty's consul at Tamsui resided within an easy morning's walk of an inactive volcano. The summit was a cradle four hundred yards in diameter, and ten miles off was a spot which was very much favored by the European inhabitants. There was a river of hot water, and not many yards off a cold waterfall. The river was fifteen yards broad and five or six feet deep, while the cold waterfall was fifty or sixty feet in height. The surrounding tract was of course burned ground, where no vegetation could exist; but a quarter of a mile away the flora was luxuriant, and the best pineapples in Formosa, which are the best in the world, were cultivated on the very margin of Avernus.

Mountain-Farming in Norway.—Farming in the mountain-regions of Norway is carried on under difficulties that would discourage an agriculturist bred on our prairies. The steep hills and rocks leave no broad spaces for fields, and the mountaineer, to winter his stock, has to make hay out of the grass that grows on the narrow ledges and in the crevices. If he manages to get a considerable crop off a hill, he will store it in sheds till winter, when he will send it down into the valley in bundles along a strong wire which he has stretched from the foot of the mountain to the top. To dry the hay, poles are planted near the patches, between which ropes or long sticks are laid till a sort of six-barred railing is formed. On these bars the hay is laid, and dried in a most effective manner. Corn is tied in small bundles and impaled on poles placed at intervals in the field. The potato-crop is farmed on a like small scale. The seeds are dropped here and there wherever there is a possibility of their taking root. At one place potatoes were noticed growing on a bowlder, where a soil about eighteen inches deep had gathered or been placed, the whole field being a triangle the sides of which were each about twelve feet in length. Small patches from twenty feet to as many yards square are common; while not unfrequently the corn-fields are but a name, for they meander like a stream in all directions among the huge bowlders and bare rocky hillocks which compose so great a part of the surface of a farm-land. The lands are usually very light. Manuring is not resorted to as