"The preservation of potable water," writes Felix Jacquot, "is certainly one of the capital points of hygiene."
"I am sometimes disposed to think," states Dr. Letheby, the health officer of London, "that impure water is before impure air as one of the most powerful causes of disease." In cold climates slight impurities in the drinking water are not of vital importance; but in the tropics, and the adjacent regions, the least decayed vegetable or animal matter renders it injurious and unpalatable, and often is the determining cause of disease, especially enteric, to a fearful degree.
During the months of June, July, August, and September, 1864, there was an aggregate number of prisoners of about twenty-eight thousand for each month. To supply this vast number of men with bread would have been ordinarily no easy task, requiring, as it would have done, twenty-eight thousand rations of bread daily, or eight hundred and forty thousand rations monthly. We have shown that the bakery could not have furnished more than ninety-six hundred rations of corn bread, of the United States weight of twenty ounces, or ninety-six hundred rations daily, or two hundred and eighty-eight thousand rations monthly, and probably furnished but five thousand rations daily, or one hundred and fifty thousand rations monthly. If this deficiency of a half a million of rations existed, how can it be explained?
Was munition bread brought from a distance to supply the deficiency? When and whence, we will ask?
During the period embracing the months of July, August, and September, 1864, the rebel commissary furnished, according to his statements, two hundred and twenty-three thousand bushels of corn meal, and thirty-seven hundred bushels of flour for the prison.
There was, during this time (ninety-two days), a monthly aggregate of twenty-nine thousand prisoners, who required twenty-nine thousand rations of corn meal daily; or, multiplied by ninety-two days, two million six hundred and sixty-eight thousand rations for the period of three months; or, allowing the same weight as the rebel ration, we have 2,668,000 × 1-1/3 = 3,567,333 pounds of corn meal, or seventy-one thousand one hundred and forty-six bushels, allowing fifty pounds to the bushel. If we now estimate the rebel garrison to have been four thousand in the aggregate, we will have for the requirements, 4000 × 92 × 1-1/2 = 552,000 pounds of meal, or ten thousand one hundred and ninety bushels, which gives, as total for the prison and garrison, eighty-one thousand two hundred and eighty-six bushels of corn meal.
