Every
tissue in the living bodies which had absorbed this water was inflamed,
and ready to yield to the first epidemic; and cholera was the natural
outcome of such conditions. Knowledge should guard against any such
chances. See to it that no open cesspool poisons either air or water about
your home. Sunk at a proper distance from the house, and connected with it
by a drain so tightly put together that none of the contents can escape,
the cesspool, which may be an elaborate, brick-lined cistern, or merely an
old hogshead thoroughly tarred within and without, and sunk in the ground,
becomes one of the most important adjuncts of a good garden. If, in
addition to this, a pile of all the decaying vegetable matter--leaves,
weeds, &c.--is made, all dead cats, hens, or puppies finding burial there;
and the whole closely covered with earth to absorb, as fresh earth has the
power to do, all foul gases and vapors; and if at intervals the pile is
wet through with liquid from the cesspool, the richest form of fertilizer
is secured, and one of the great agricultural duties of man
fulfilled,--that of "returning to the soil, as fertilizers, all the salts
produced by the combustion of food in the human body."
Where the water-supply is brought into the house from a common reservoir,
much the same rules hold good.
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