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The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920
Conservation by sanitation; disposal of waste (including a laboratory guide for sanitary engineers) by Ellen H. RichardsWater Supply Inspection
In the rapid development of resources, the American has frequently reversed the order of scientific procedure to the ultimate delay of good engineering as well as of good government.
The inspection of watersheds, for instance, has often been intrusted to the topographer or to the surveyor, whose eyes and nose have not been trained in the laboratory to see things and to follow the scent. Hence he has to draw many important lessons.
The laboratory is the elementary school where the sanitary engineer learns the A B C and the simple language needed. Here he learns to understand the signs of the trail, the broken twig, the plucked leaf, the flower bent by the moccasin. It is after the attention has been called to signs, and observation has been trained, that the engineer may go over the country and see what the careless eye fails to catch. Therefore the laboratory is an indispensable adjunct to the engineer's training. (The sanitary official will become more and more an engineer rather than a medical man as prevention becomes more clearly the duty of the community.)
But the laboratory must be an engineer's laboratory, not the
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old-time one of the chemist or the bacteriologist. Some one, of course, must go over all the steps that have led to the conclusions, but the engineer wishes to know the conclusions and how he may use them. Time fails for both. It is seen that the machine is to be controlled, not built, by the engineer.
As some one had side, the sciences are no longer in water-tight compartments, but flow freely from one to the other. The library and the laboratory are the engineer's tools as much as the theodolite and the transit. A certain modicum of fundamental chemistry--general principles and names and reactions--is necessary to the reading of modern scientific literature and to the understanding of current conversation. But laboratory processes are highly educational. The first sanitary law--quick removal of all wastes--applies to clean hands, clean apparatus, clean methods. Sterilization of unclean bottles is still not uncommon.
The water assay in distinction from a complete "water analysis" is intended to furnish material for the diagnosis. Not all these facts may be useful, but it is best to record them against a possible value in the future.
Just as in a case of sickness the physician keeps the daily range of the bodily temperature of his patient, since it may give him the clew he is seeking, so the analyst makes the determinations for free ammonia, nitrites, and chlorine, not because they are always significant in themselves but because they may furnish the clew to what is happening. It is the active condition that the sanitary engineer is looking for, what is likely to happen. The chemist and bacteriologist may tell what has occurred and what the condition at the present moment may be. The family asks of the physician what will be the patient's condition when this attack is over. The community is coming to ask the sanitary engineer what will be the character of the water supply after this treatment.
A noteworthy instance of an attempt at interpretation on new lines is the study which is, after several year's trial, now reported in Bulletin No. 7 of the Illinois State Survey.
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