All suspected water should be thoroughly boiled before using it to drink. Some physicians insist that the boiling should continue for one or two hours in order entirely to destroy the bacterial germs. The heaviness and insipidity incident to boiled water may be somewhat relieved by afterward filtering it. Filtering, of itself, however, will do little toward ridding the water of microbes, which are much too minute to be arrested by the ordinary apparatus.--When journeying, where one must often take a hasty meal at a railway station, drink hot water in preference to cold. A convenient portable filter may be arranged with a bottle of powdered charcoal, and a piece of filtering paper. A traveler by briskly stirring a tablespoonful of the charcoal into a pint of water, allowing it to stand five or ten minutes, and then filtering it through the paper, may venture to relieve his thirst in almost any part of the country.
_Water an Absorbent of Foul Gases_.--If a pitcher of water be left uncovered in an occupied apartment for only a few hours, it will become foul from the absorption of the respired and perspired gases in the room. The colder the water, the greater the capacity to contain these gases. Water kept in a room over night is therefore unfit for drinking, and should not be used even to brush the teeth or to gargle in the throat.
_Impure Ice, a Breeder of Disease_.--We generally take the purity of our ice for granted, and, like the alligator in the bayou, close our mouths and swallow it. In the country, I have seen during the ice- harvesting season, wagon after wagon passing me on the road, laden with ice that had been collected from canals, rivers, and streams receiving sewerage, and from ponds that are in the summer time reeking with slime, and often offensive from the quantity of decomposed vegetable and animal matter brought in by the washing from the meadow. These streams would be shunned as a source of water supply.
Should you interview a native regarding the slimy mud puddle before you, called Mr. So-and-so's private "ice pond," he would say that "in winter it is much better, and when frozen, you know, it makes fine ice," presenting that popular though ignorant belief that while in the act of crystallizing, water rids itself of all its injurious qualities, however offensive it may be in its liquid state. Unfortunately, there is enough truth in the current idea of the elimination of noxious and foreign matter during the process of freezing to give color to the popular belief, but not enough to make it a safe reliance; therefore all means should be used to enlighten the public regarding this subject. Experiment has shown that freezing produces little change or effect in overcoming the poisonous influences, and ice has often served as a vehicle to convey the germs of typhoid and other low forms of fever. Pure ice can be procured only from water free from impurities, and ice for domestic or surgical purposes should never be collected from ponds or streams which contain animal or vegetable refuse, or stagnant and muddy material.--_Journal of Reconstructives, Oct., 1887_.