and then with many nice contrivances and much perishable machinery we try to wash them away with a bucket of water.  Not to carry them where they will do any good, not to put them out of existence, but simply to hide them:  to send them out of our immediate sight, and very likely into some greater mischief.  The system is radically wrong, and while many of its existing evils may be averted, they cannot all be removed till we make our attacks from a different base.  Improving sewers, like strengthening prison walls, is a good thing if the institutions remain; to prevent the need of maintaining them would be better still.  Three-fourths of the solid wastes that proceed from human dwellings—­scraps of food, waste paper, worthless vegetables, worn-out utensils, bones, weeds, old boots and shoes, whatever unmanageable and unnamable rubbish appears—­ought to be at once consumed by fire, for which purpose a small cremating furnace should be found in every house.  A similar trial by fire would reduce a large part of the liquids and semi-liquids to solid form to be also consumed, and the rest, absorbed by dry earth or ashes, could easily be transported to the barren fields that await the intelligence and power of man to transform them into blooming gardens.

“Of the usual modes of bringing water to our houses to wash away these things I know but little, because there is but little to be known.  Complications and mysteries are not to my taste.  I find no satisfaction in overthrowing a man of straw, and am comparatively indifferent to the rival claims of patentees and manufacturers, except as they promise good material, faithful workmanship and moderate prices.

“The one thing needful, if we adopt the hydraulic method of carrying away these waste substances, is a smooth cast-iron pipe running from the ground outside the house in through the lower part and up and out through the roof.  It should be open at both ends, and so free from obstruction that a cat, a chimney-swallow or a summer breeze could pass through it without difficulty.  I would, however, put screens over the open ends to keep out the cats and the swallows.  The purifying breezes should blow through in summer and winter without let or hindrance, and to promote their circulation I would, if possible, place the pipe beside a warm chimney.  Yet if the air it contains should sometimes move downward it will do no special harm; anything is better than stagnation.  Into this open pipe, which should be not only water-tight but air-tight through its entire length, all waste-pipes from the house should empty as turbid mountain torrents pour into the larger stream that flows through the valley. (Fig. 1.) Now, unless the upward draught through this large pipe is constant and strong, you will see at once that the air contained in it (which we must treat as though it were always poisonous) would be liable to come up through these branches into the rooms, where they stand with open mouths ready to swallow