Q. As a personal favor, will you tell me if there can be any harm in allowing waste-water from bath and wash-basin to run into an open-side cesspool (covered at top), such cesspool being in gravelly ground? Water-closets and wash-tubs will be connected by a separate pipe to cemented cesspool. House is in the country, and open-side cesspool would be 100 feet from house.

A. Such a cesspool will contaminate the soil about it quite as surely as if receiving the drainage of water-closets, though perhaps not quite so rapidly. It is better to distribute the refuse on or near the surface. A collection of waste-water from bath-tubs and wash-bowls will become as foul as any other refuse from the house, and differs only from other refuse in being diluted by a greater bulk of water.

The disposal of house-sewage in suburban residences is a very troublesome question, especially where a public water-supply is afforded without sewers - a state of things which is not compatible with public safety. Distribution on the surface is the simplest method; but this requires at least an acre about every house, in order to make it free from offense.

It can be distributed in porous tiles about ten inches under the surface on smaller house-lots if the conditions are favorable - viz., a well-drained or porous soil.

Whether on the surface or beneath it, there must be slope enough to allow the sewage to flow by gravity from the bottom of the cesspool to the place of distribution, otherwise pumping is necessary, which is of course onerous. When distributing in pipes beneath the surface, it is usual to lay 2-inch unglazed tiles, with joints at least one-quarter of an inch open, in trenches ten or twelve inches deep, graded with a uniform fall of not over an inch in ten feet at most, and sometimes not over half this amount. Sufficient ramification and length of pipe must be provided to give a capacity of at least one-half that of the cesspool or tank to be discharged; the other half is generally soaked away during the flow. It is important to secure an intermittent flow in the tiles. If a constant driblet flows into them they will always be choked in a short time. When on a larger scale, as for hotels and public institutions, Field's flush-tank is used with success to secure this periodic or intermittent flow, but it does not operate so well for small cesspools. If the water-supply is limited to what is pumped by hand in the house, the discharge can be made by means of a stop-gate laid in the outlet-pipe leading from the bottom of the cesspool, and operated by hand when required, as described in Philbrick's "American Sanitary Engineering," page 93. The tiles adapted for this purpose are readily obtainable.