bacterial films upon the rocks absorb the organic matter and bacteria present, and at the end the remaining liquid is discharged. Oxygen is thereby allowed entrance to the films, and the bacteria do their appointed work as scavengers. By careful regulation as to the time necessary to accomplish the results, satisfactory purification may be obtained; but extreme care has to be taken in the control.

The third type of disposal is still simpler in principle. In early experiments with intermittent filtration, air was forced in from below to allow for the breathing of the filters. Soon the necessity for more air, for increased supplies of oxygen, made further experiments along the line of intermittent filtration necessary. In the trickling or sprinkling filter it was first made possible to treat sewage with a continuous supply of air. In this process, by one means or another, the tipping of small buckets or splashing from sprinklers, the sewage is constantly passing into a filter filled with coarse gravel. As it trickles down between the openings, it carries with it air for its own destruction. Oxygen is also obtained from the open construction of the filter, which allows constant air communication between the interstices. The bacterial films upon the stones absorb the organic matters and new bacterial life, as in the case of the contact bed; and through the constant breathing of the filters the oxygen necessary for the burning up or oxidization of the wastes is secured.

To produce complete bacterial efficiency the effluent, or outcoming liquid, may be rapidly filtered through a second filter, filled with sand or sterilized by copper.

The action of the intermittent filter and the possibilities of its use can be expressed in no way better than by quoting the brilliant ending of Mr. Winslow's article on this subject: "The trickling bed appears to be the ideal method of solving the essential problem of sewage disposal, the oxidation of organic matter. It exhibits

the simplicity of all scientific applications which are merely intelligent intensifications of natural processes. A pile of stones on which bacterial growth may gather and a regulated supply of sewage are the only desiderata. We meet the conditions resulting from an abnormal aggregation of human life in the city by setting up a second city of microbes. The dangerous organic waste material produced in the city of human habitations is carried out to the city of microbes on their hills of rock, and we rely on them to turn it over into a harmless mineral form.”

One last method of bacterial destruction of sewage must be considered here, the septic tank, the successor of the individual cesspool. While impracticable for final disposition, it has an unquestioned value as a preliminary step in the treatment of certain concentrated sewages. The principle of the ordinary cesspool depends upon the fact that a large part of the solid organic wastes are acted upon in the closed dark receptacles, without access of air, by bacterial ferments, and are turned into a liquid which may be drained off. Such solid portions as are unaffected by this change may be removed a couple of times a year. In the modern form of septic tank the wastes, instead of being left to be acted on for a long period without the use of oxygen, are run into a close tank where they are left for about twenty-four hours. During this time, the chief decomposition has taken place, after which the residues are pumped to the filters or contact beds, where the final oxidation may occur by means of the oxygen of the air.

We have already considered the use of the household filter in some detail; but the general problem of good water and safe sewage appeals to every owner of a country house, and a few words on this subject should be inserted here. The best soil for these purposes is a sandy one, and wherever a rocky or clayey soil gives possibility of a fissure which might connect water and drainage, expert examination should be called in. The individ

ual plant for sewage disposal may often be a well and a cesspool, - the cesspool, once a bogy to sanitarians, being now justified by the septic tank and the sand filter, both of which principles are employed in its construction. Two points must be recognized here. Such a covering of the well that the grave danger of surface pollution may be avoided, for it is most essential that no pollution should be washed through covering boards. Also the direction of drainage, which is generally toward the nearest water course, must be such that the water supply may not be below the point of sewage disposal. With these simple precautions of soil, covering of well, and proper location of water and drainage, the isolated country house owner may feel secure.

Lastly, to sum it all up: what is the present status of the work? What is the real purpose of sanitary engineering, and how does it affect us as public-spirited citizens?

As we look over the whole field of effort, the striking factors of present-day progress in bacterial removal and sewage disposal seem to be taking on definite specialized form. The sanitary engineer is using one method for water,

-the re

moval of evil bacteria by filtration. A very different method prevails to-day for sewage, the cultivation of good bacteria which may render safe the city by their removal of its dangerous organic wastes. Removal of the evil and cultivation of the good! The most highly specialized forms of water and sewage filters show this best. The mechanical water filter has chemicals to separate out the bacteria, pneumatic arrangements to wash

out the sand, and casings of concrete for protection from the air. The sewage filter, on the other hand, is, in its essentials, nothing more than a pile of rock on which the good bacteria may grow. The future advance of sanitary science seems likely to be along these lines. More and more dependence is placed upon research, and the real importance of the problem seems daily more manifest. The careful experiments at the Columbus Experiment Station in Ohio, as well as the fact that a Sewage Research Station has been established by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, show the trend of the day.

To make the city habitable, to increase the efficiency of the state through the better health of its citizens, - what task

is higher than this great labor for the common good? On the man in control of the water system or the sewage plant rests the success or failure of many measures planned for the public weal. In the solution of that great problem in applied science, the government of the city, no man must bear a greater responsibility than the sanitary engineer. In such solution research and study may do much; but all individual effort must be supported by a righteous public sentiment. Such civic interest should be awakened in every community as will demand that the guardians of our public health shall be rightly trained, wise, and free. Above all free, - since freedom from political control, from jealousies and narrowness, must be secured in order that full power may be given to the guardians of the public health to keep up the fight until the final conquest of the germ.

THE persistence of the power of appeal of the Old Testament is perhaps the most striking single phenomenon in all the history of literature: here are works which were written considerably more than two thousand years ago, in a language of a wholly different race and genius from ours, and in the region of the world whose only other familiar contribution to our reading is the Arabian Nights; yet this ancient and Oriental book, after passing through the ordeal of translation into a Western and modern language, has become the one book which is or has been familiar to all classes of Englishspeaking people, and has grown into the bone and sinew not only of our literature, but of our language also. Behind such a phenomenon as this is the great fact of inspiration, a fact which in such a study in literature as I propose here it is safer not to try to define. The limits between religious and literary inspiration lie in a broad region where the two run inextricably together; and within that region every one who is interested in an exact delimitation must run his line for himself. Here I shall simply assume that it is a power which in all its manifestations is inexplicable, and confine myself to certain questions which plainly lie within the field of literature and within the capacities of criticism.

The special problem which I shall examine is the persistence of power of which I have just spoken. To simplify the discussion I shall confine myself to the poetry, which though not the key to the whole literature of the Old Testament in any such sense as is the prophecy, is yet more instant and universal in its appeal to modern readers. Moreover, in the poetry we shall find concentrated the elements and influences which seem to me

to throw most light on the permanent power of the book, the concreteness of the language, the strong rhythm and music of the style, and the underlying intensity of feeling. Each of these contributes to the power of all parts of our English Bible, but to no part of it more obviously or with richer result than to the poetry.

This poetry as we have it consists of the Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the oracles of the prophets, and a certain number of earlier poems scattered through the books of history. Here, however, even more than with the rest of Biblical literature, we must remember that we have only a portion of all the poetry of Israel, and perhaps only a small portion. Whole classes of it must have disappeared. The literature was collected during and after the Exile by men who were passionately and wholly devoted to preserving the religion of Jehovah from the attacks of the heathen, and to making it a living force for righteousness among the remnant of their own nation. They were concerned with the revelations of God to man, not with the imaginations of men's hearts; and for them no writing was of value which did not bear on the history of God's chosen people and on the revelation of his will. That there must have been other poetry than what we have admits of no doubt; there must have been other songs of victory than that of Deborah, other dirges than those of David on Saul and Jonathan and on Abner, other poems than those on the sluggard and the drunkard which are preserved in Proverbs, other love and wedding songs than those of the Song of Solomon. What is left merely shows how large and rich was the art of poetry among the people of Israel from the

earliest times. During the distresses of the Exile and the succeeding centuries, when the Jews were tossed from one conqueror to another, and harried and spoiled in the unceasing wars for the control of Palestine, all but their most essential writings must have disappeared. We must remember, therefore, in any discussion of the poetry of the Old Testament, that we have only a portion of the Hebrew literature, and that rigidly selected for a direct and practical religious purpose.

When we turn to a consideration of this poetry as we read it in our English Bible the characteristic of it which is most striking is its unfailing hold on our feelings and imagination: whether it be the idyllic peace and beauty of Psalm xxiii, or the happy confidence of most of the "Songs of Degrees," the overpowering splendor of Psalm lxviii or civ, or in Job the poignant suffering of Job's cries to his God or the heaven-sweeping imagery of the later chapters, always and at every time of reading the words have a fresh completeness of meaning. For the whole range of ideas and emotion reached by these poems they are the most satisfying and stirring expression in the language, and they have been so to men so widely separated in temperament and education as Milton and Bunyan, or, within our own time, as Ruskin and Abraham Lincoln. Assuming, as I said above, the fact of inspiration, and looking at the matter merely from the side of the expressive power of language, how can words be so put together as to move so many kinds of people, over such long stretches of history?

One certain source of this marvelous power lies in the character of the Hebrew language. For our present purpose we may confine ourselves to the character of the vocabulary: it had no words for anything but the concrete objects of the external world and for the simplest and most primitive emotions. All the words of the old Hebrew vocabulary went back immediately to things of sense, and in consequence even their every-day lanVOL. 98 - NO. 3

guage was figurative in a way which we can hardly imagine. The verb to be jealous was a regular form of the verb to glow; the noun truth was derived from the verb meaning to prop, to build, or to make firm; the word for self was also the word for bone. Renan has summed up this characteristic of the language in the following passage: "Anger is expressed in Hebrew in a throng of ways, each picturesque, and each borrowed from physiological facts. Now the metaphor is taken from the rapid and animated breathing which accompanies the passion, now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking, now from shivering. Discouragement and despair are expressed by the melting of the heart, fear by the loosening of the reins. Pride is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure straight and stiff. Patience is a long breathing, impatience short breathing, desire is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of hiding, or coating over the fault. In Job God sews up sins in a sack, seals it, then throws it behind him: all to signify that he forgets them. Other more or less abstract ideas have found their symbol in the Semitic languages in a like manner. The idea of truth is drawn from solidity, or stability; that of beauty from splendor, that of good from straightness, that of evil from swerving or the curved line, or from stench. To create is primitively to mould, to decide is to cut, to think is to speak. Bone signifies the substance, the essence of a thing, and serves in Hebrew for our pronoun self. What distinguishes the Semitic languages from the Aryan is that this primitive union of sensation and idea persists, so that in each word one still hears the echo of the primitive sensations which determined the choice of the first makers of the language."

Now this limitation of the Hebrew language to words which expressed immediate sensation goes a long way toward explaining this problem we are

studying when we consider it in the light of one of the accepted doctrines of modern psychology, the theory commonly known as the James-Lange theory of the emotions. According to this theory emotion is inseparable from sensation, or rather emotion consists of a mass or complex of bodily sensations. Professor James sums up this doctrine in the following questions: "What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer for one, certainly cannot. . . . In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pangs in the breastbone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion tells the same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity."

This theory and the Hebrew language fit together like the two parts of a puzzle, for the Hebrew poetry constantly expressed emotion by naming the sensations of which the emotion consists. Here is an expression of helpless despair:

Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.

:

Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof.

In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men,

Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.

Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up:

It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his Maker?

The shaking of the bones, the hair of the flesh standing up, the sense of an object indistinctly present, the silence, all go together to make the most vivid description in our literature of the terror that flies by night; and here again, as in the Psalms, the emotion is set forth by means of the concrete sensations of which it consists. For one more example, let me quote another passage from the Psalms, the first few verses of what is known in the Book of Common Prayer as the Venite: here the emotion of joyful worship is expressed by the bodily acts in which it is expressed :

O come, let us sing unto the Lord: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms.

For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.

In this case the emotion is more spiritual than in the others, yet it is still phrased chiefly in terms of bodily sensation, the singing, the joyful noise, the bowing down and kneeling.

Sometimes, as in part in the last example, the emotion, instead of being expressed by the bodily sensation that constitutes it, is indirectly portrayed by naming the concrete objects which produce these sensations by immediate and reflex action.