Bacteria in Water

Abstract

ON perusing this volume, there can be left no doubt in the mind of anyone who has paid attention to the enormous progress in the knowledge of microorganisms in water, that the authors have succeeded in producing a work which testifies to a full and accurate survey of the subject, and to a large amount of original observations carried out by the modern approved methods. For these reasons we venture to say that this volume will occupy the posltion of a valuable text-book and standard work on the subject of micro-organisms in water. The views which the authors, in common with modern sanitarians, hold as to the relative value of the chemical and biological examination of potable waters, deserves special attention on behalf of some distinguished chemists, on whose mind the whole progress of bacteriological science seems to have as yet made but little impression; in this connection we quote, from p. 117, chapter v., the authors' statement which, being those of a distinguished chemist, it is to be hoped will have the desired effect:—“If water which is known to have received sewage matters (and the entire exclusion of such from supplies drawn from rivers is practically impossible) is to be supplied for dietetic use, and if this water, as is so often the case, is not objectionable on account of the absolute quantity of organic matter, as revealed by chemical analysis, which it contains, but only of the suspicious origin of a part of this organic matter, then it is evident that in the purification of such water the point to be taken primarily into consideration is how the organic life it contains can be reduced to a minimum.” The authors might have further added that the chemical analysis only of such waters is for sanitary purposes of little practical use, since a water may contain less than the recognised amount of organic matter, and yet be dangerous for drinking purposes on account of the presence in it of some undesired pathogenic microbes. The amount of organic matter and the presence of these latter in water need not, and in some cases {e.g. the well-known outbreak of typhoid fever at Cater-ham) do not bear a constant or a definite relation to one another. As a more recent illustration of this kind, the well-known instance of the cholera in Hamburg and Altona in 1892 may be quoted.

Micro-Organisms in Water; their Significance, Identification, and Removal.

By Prof. Percy Frankland Mrs. Percy Frankland. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894)