ON THE DECOMPOSITION AND METAMORPHOSIS OF ANIMAL BEINGS, AND ON THE INFLUENCE THEY EXERCISE OVER THE SOIL AS A HABITAT FOR MAN.
During life animal bodies undergo continual decomposition and recomposition; life is in fact a perpetual metamorphosis. Whilst alive, the products of vitality (_excreta_) are returned to or deposited in or on the surface of the earth, and carried by drainage and other means into the nearest water, river, or stream; we have lived to see them thrown _en masse_ into a tidal river the waters of which serve at the same time to furnish most of that required for the economy of a vast capital and many surrounding towns; in the same country the cesspools and dead-wells constructed to receive the liquid and solid _excreta_ of dwelling-houses are not unfrequently constructed close to the pump-well which is to supply the inhabitants with pure water for culinary purposes.
To these extraordinary facts I shall shortly return. They show the extent to which intelligent, talented, shrewd men may suffer themselves to be deluded and led aside from the path pointed out by common sense, more especially when crotchets are substituted for principles; when men fancy that in following out some imperfectly-observed inquiry, they are imitating nature--that nature which is ever consonant with herself, which created all animals, and which knows how to dispose of their excreta when living, and of their remains when dead, without detriment to the living. The Caffre, the Hottentot, the Bosjieman, the North-American Indian, the Bedouin, require no sanitary arrangements, no laws regulating, nor staff to carry out a code of theoretical Utopian schemes, sure to revert on the heads of those foolish enough to employ them; the excreta deposited on the earth disappear, so do also the remains of animal life. We never hear of any pestilence, fever, scurvy, dysentery, small-pox, hooping-cough, malignant sore-throat, or other zymotics, originating amongst them. It would, indeed, almost seem that such evils do actually owe their origin to human agency and to human civilization; where civilized man makes his highest endeavours, there his most signal failure occurs; experience teaches him nothing; the insolence of wealth naturally leads to the contempt of all knowledge derived from means otherwise than national and native. In Britain the muddy banks of rivers, which in Holland and Belgium are covered with vegetation, lie exposed, festering in the sun’s rays, the fertile source of agues and other diseases; here they are being continually exposed, or alternately covered with water, which is then allowed to evaporate; this mud is not suffered to rest, but stirred up in a variety of ways, as best suits the convenience of the parties interested. It suits, for example, the proprietor of a long-neglected drain or sewer, cesspool or filthy stagnant canal, or a common ditch, which once was a clear rivulet, to cleanse it out. He selects the warmest weather and the longest day for that special work, or he spreads the contents of the cesspools of half a century’s collection on the fields, suffering it to remain there for weeks, thus rendering the roads all but impassable. The selected lives of the finest men in the kingdom, petted, fed, clothed, and lodged at the public charge, without anxiety or a care for to-morrow--the Guards of England--die under his fostering hand, in the ratio of three to one of the care-worn and toil-exhausted peasant, miserably fed, scantily clothed, badly lodged, and full of anxiety for the morrow. Now, how comes this? Simply, I believe, from this--that man, knowing much better than nature, has chosen to take her place, to do her work clumsily, and to fancy that he is doing it well; to interfere, and not to carry through the works he has undertaken. What other proof can be required than the fact that, on the frontiers of the Cape of Good Hope, in the healthiest country in the world--a fact proved not only by the statistics of the celebrated statistician, Major Tulloch, but by the evidence of all medical men who have resided there,--where the mortality is not a half of what it is amongst the most favoured counties of England--in such a country, where every man might have had a mile square of ground to live on, military arrangements contrived to break down whole regiments of the healthiest young men England could produce.[29]