Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/248

 230 THE BUILDING NEWS. Marcu 22, 1872. sss 0:. °° ss bodies, hammer-cloths, oilskin hammer-cloths, occasional requisites (whatever these may haye been), plated furniture, frames, head- plates for a coach, chariot, or pheton, joints real, joints sham, body loops, pole hooks, buckles, wheel-hoops, spiral or worm springs, lamps, globes, Italian and oval steps, painting and varnishing, herald and ornament paint- ing, arms, crests, cyphers, mantles, borders, fillets, and strippings; chaise, curricle, or pheeton head-wings, knee-boot and dashing- leather, braces and pole pieces, travelling requisites, trunks, trunk covers, imperials, cap-box, hat-box, wells, splinter bars, drag- chains, and steps; spring tool-budgets, and oil covers. Even this is not all. ‘There are charges for splinter-bar rolls covering, pole stuffing, treads of chaise-steps covering, points of the shafts covering, heel-leathers, and Salisbury boots, with an exorbitant in- ventory of necessaries for the horses besides. But having taken away our own breath by the enumeration, we will not take away that of the reader, who may now be aware of the difficulties attendant upon ‘setting up” a carriage. —_—___g—__—__ THE CONSERVANCY OF RIVERS. HEN the Royal Sanitary Commission made their report, one of them dis- sented from the conclusions of the rest in respect of the constitution of an intermediate authority between the local sanitary board and the central authority. ‘The intermediate authority was called a cushion, or a buffer, supposed by its advocates to be beneficial in protecting the central authority from the odium of taking direct proceedings in any matter in which the local authority might refuse to act. County boards, it was pro- posed by some witnesses, might be such “buffers,” but the difficulty of coincident boundaries of parishes and counties seemed to stand in the way of that, and Lord Robert Montagu proposed that the natural boundary of the watershed of every river basin should be taken as the boundary of the sanitary district, irrespective of county or any other artificial area, and he was requested by the Commission to make a written statement of his reasons for recommending that. The second volume of the second report contains the paper by the Right Hon. Lord Robert Montagu, M.P., on ‘ Watershed Boards, or Conservancy Boards for River Basins,” in which the reasons are set forth for the prefer- ence of such an area over any other. So far as the sanitary question is influenced by the water supply for domestic purposes—and that, of course, it must be to a large extent—the watershed area would appear to be preferable to more restricted areas, but it is against it that its area is in general too large fora sanitary district under the authority of one body. ‘Take, for instance, the Severn basin, it has an area of more than 8,000 square miles, which, if it were in the form of a square, would be more than ninety miles each Way, and if we take out of the Severn watershed that of the Wye, which is a tributary to the Severn outfall, there remains still for the Severn propera drainage area of considerably more than 4,000 acres, and, if squared, this area would be nearly seventy miles either way ; and this itis, we presume, which induced the Commission, with the exception of Lord tobert Montagu, to recommend the smaller area of a Union for the sanitary district. The Severn is the largest of all the watersheds of England, but there are others still very large. Take the Thames basin, for instance ; it is more than 6,000 square miles in extent. The Great Ouse is nearly 3,000, and the Trent more than 4,000 square miles. We are taking these areas from the hydrographical map of the British Isles by Mr. Petermann, F.R.G.S., supplemented with the rainfall at about 150 stations by Mr. G. J. Symons; and according to that map the areas of the watersheds of English and Irish rivers appear to be in general too large for practical sanitary pur- poses. Besides the areas of the river basins that we have given, it appears from the same map that the Yorkshire Ouse has an area of more than 4,000 square miles; the Mersey, 1,748; the Tyne, 1,100; the Eden nearly 1,000; and in Ireland the Shannon has no less than 6,946 square miles; the Barrow, 3,410; the Blackwater, 1,165; and so on, so that these large areas do seem to have warranted—if, indeed, that was their reason—the conclusion of the majority of the Commission that these watershed areas are practically too large for sanitary districts. It is a good idea, no doubt, this of Lord Robert Montagu, that those who shall have the command of all sanitary affairs shall have at the same time the command of all affairs relating to the water supply of the country—whether that supply be regarded as domestic, for trading purposes, or for navigation ; and if it were not that it seems prrbable that if a main watershed be divided amongst the tributary streams there would be difficulties of jurisdiction, this form of area would certainly be the best; but when we see that for all England there could be but about 30 of these areas, the reflection occurs whether these 30 or other such number should be constituted, or whether it would not be better at once to reduce the authority to one central one, as a guiding one, leaving the practical local sanitary government in the hands of the Unions, as proposed by the Sanitary Commission—or in those of the parish, as was proposed by the Government in the Bill they withdrew some time ago. That Bill was not founded on the report of the Sanitary Commission, and appeared to have been but partially considered. Whenever legislation on this subject may take a practical shape, this question of watershed areas can hardly be ignored, but whether it would be better to adopt the watershed area as the area of the sanitary authority rather than that of the Union or the parish is certainly open to question. Let us imagine the position. The interests of a river are co-extensive with its drainage area, basin, or watershed (as the area is called variously by different persons, although the latter term would more appropriately be applied to the boundary lines of the area, being those lines along which the rainfall is is divided in its course towards the several rivers), and these interests consist of (1) the prevention of the pollution of the river; (2) the maintenance of the flow of water in its proper bed, the effect being the prevention of floods; (5) its fisheries, comprehending the regulation of the “lake” at its mouth, and the preservation of its spawning beds higher up, so that there be no antagonism of interest between these two; (4) its nayiga- tion; (5) its use as water power, compre- hending the weirs placed across it to accu- mulate fall for this purpose, and which must be considered in connection with the question of flooding the land by means of such obstructions; (6) the storage of surplus waters. Now all these interests are interwoven, so that unless they are under the control of one and the same authority, some of them will be neglected. It has been proposed to include under the authority of the watershed boards the arterial drainage of the land; but the duties of protecting the interests we have named above will always be sufliciently onerous, and need not be complicated by including the question of drainage, which, when the regimen of the river is preserved, would probably be effectually performed by the owners of the land. At any rate, the drainage question might be left out for the present; and, indeed, it will require less attention when the land is not so often flooded as it is now by the improper con- dition of the river channel, These things, then, requiring a single authority for each watershed, let us see whether a sanitary district ought to be co- extensive with the watershed. It would be | too large for local sanitary government. Sani- tary business, for the most part, consists of smaller and more divisible things; smaller individually, but large and important enough in the aggregate—such as the removal of nuisances, the drainage of a town and its water supply, the prevention of oyercrowd- ing (both the overcrowding of houses with people and the land with houses), the vacci- nation of the people, the provision of hospi- tals, the burial of the dead ; these and kindred considerations occupy the chief attention of of a local sanitary authority, and it would seem to be desirable to limit the area over which such an authority has jurisdiction, rather than to seek to make it as extensive as possible. It would seem, therefore, that to limit it toa parish or to a union would be better for such purposes than to consti- tute a large watershed the area of the sani- tary authority. And if it be said that there is no need to take the whole of a large water- shed, but that it may be divided amongst its contributing areas, the answer would be that that cuts away the principle of an undivided watershed area, and would be unsuitable for other purposes, Does it not, then, seem that there should be a watershed authority for water purposes alone, and smaller districts for sanitary pur- poses? The sanitary authorities would derive their water supplies for all purposes from the watershed authority, whose duty it would be to conserve all the water committed to their hands for the equal benefit of all dwel- lers in their respective watersheds, or river basins; and, where the quantity might be inadequate for the use of all, then to apply to the central authority for power to go out of their own watershed to some other that could be agreed upon. This, however, would seldom be necessary, if the supply were properly stored and distributed. If the watershed board were constituted on the basis of dealing solely with water, leaying sewage and other polluted water to be dealt with by the sanitary authorities before it should come again into their possession, and supplying every sanitary authority who might demand it with water for domestic purposes at the rate of 20 gallons per head of their respective populations, the watershed board might dispose of the remainder with pecu- niary advantage for navigation purposes, for trades, and for ‘nill power, where that could be done without injury to other interests. They would thus supply the sanitary authorities with water in bulk at some moderate price per 1,000 gallons to be agreed upon, or, in case of a non-agree- ment, at a price to be fixed by the central authority ;and as the work would be done systematically and under general powers over the whole watershed, the supply would probably be afforded at rates much below those now generally paid. The existing sanitary districts would be maintained for all sanitary purposes except the supply of water, which would be supplied by the water- shed board and distributed by the sanitary board. The watershed board having thus the sole control of the river and its tribu- taries, and the supply of water to all towns within their area, couldso arrange the various supplies for the different purposes as to take advantage of localities; then, where water is taken from a river for the supply of any town for domestic purposes, the requirements in respect of the purity of all water turned into theriverabove the point from which the wateris taken would be more stringent than would be necessary in the case of water turned into the river below the point of intake ; and the con- sideration bearing upon the quality of the water in this latter case would be that of the interests of the fisheries ; and, providing the requirements of that interest were satisfied, the sanitary authorities so situated might be relieved of a good deal of unnecessary ex- pense; and, again, where the riparian in- terests of the whole watershed are united in the same body who supply the towns with