Smoke Abatement: a Manual for the Use of Manufacturers, Inspectors, Medical Officers of Health, Engineers, and Others

Abstract

THE author of this handbook is chief inspector to the Sheffield Corporation, and seems to have an extensive acquaintance with the various enactments that have been passed in this and other countries with a view to ameliorate one of the greatest nuisances of modern times, and devotes more than a third of the 250 pages the book contains to their recital. This is undoubtedly useful to those desiring to make themselves acquainted with the legal aspects of the case, but scarcely justifies the subtitle of a “practical handbook,” as the author's idea of the nature of smoke is of a most delightfully rudimentary character, and his power, therefore, of prescribing remedies necessarily limited. On searching the book for a clear definition of smoke and a description of the constituents that go to build it up, we find on p. 12 the following:—“Nature of the Nuisance-Smoke consists of minute particles of carbon together with a sticky tarry matter which settles and sticks to everything it comes in contact with. It is dirt. Lord Palmerston's definition of dirt from a health point of view is ‘Matter in the wrong place,’ and carbon or coal in the atmosphere is matter in the wrong place.”

Smoke Abatement: a Manual for the Use of Manufacturers, Inspectors, Medical Officers of Health, Engineers, and Others.

By William Nicholson. Pp. xiii + 256. (London: Charles Griffin and Co., Ltd.) Price 6s. net.