Microbes, Ferments and Moulds

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1886 Excerpt: ... into evacuation pipes of the sewer by special syphons, and help to flush them. This system has been applied to the Hotel de Ville, to the new Guards' barracks, to a certain number of primary schools, and to many private houses. The municipal administration proposes to apply this system to most of the schools, hospitals, and barracks, of which the sanitary condition is at present far from satisfactory. They hope eventually to extend the same system to all private houses, so as to do away with the cesspools--a reform already effected in many foreign cities, and notably in Germany. F. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V. (p. 172), THE SEWERS OP PARIS AND THE PLAIN OF GENNEVILLIERS. The water issuing from the main sewer of the city is partly turned into the Seine, partly into the plain of Gennevilliers, and used, by a system of irrigation, for fertilizing the soil. There was some fear lest the vegetable mould might be saturated with fertilizing matter, but the presence of a special microbe was ascertained, which reduces organic matter to its inorganic constituents, and thus adapts them to be absorbed by plants. Schlcesing and Muntz, who have studied this microbe, term it the nitrifying microbe. The same system of sewer-irrigation will shortly be applied to another place in the neighbourhood of Paris, Acheres, near the forest of SaintGermain. G. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER V. (p. 172). USEFUL MICROBES. We have said that numerous bacteria exist in the digestive canal of a man in good health. Recent researches by Duclaux, Richet, and Bourquelot tend to show that these microbes are not only innoxious, but that they play an active part in gastric digestion, and especially in the transmutation of albumins into peptones. Since they are, in fact, living ferments, the transmutation is retard...