Illustrations of the Croton AqueductTower, F. B. (Fayette Bartholomew)
History
Illustrations of the Croton Aqueduct
Tower, F. B. (Fayette Bartholomew)
Croton Aqueduct (N.Y.)
walked out every day, and sometimes spent a great part of the day in
the woods. His walk was steady and firm, and his friends even remarked
that his step had an unusual elasticity; he shaved himself until about
a week before his death, and was able to sit up in bed till the last
day.”
To the evils which result from the use of impure water, we have
already alluded, although it would require far more space than has
been assigned to us in this Appendix, to do them adequate justice.
There can be no doubt, that the chief cause of the excess of mortality
in cities, over that of the country, is to be found in the impure
water, with which the former are so generally supplied, and we may
confidently predict, that in consequence mainly of the introduction
of the Croton River into the City of New-York, no city in the world
of equal size, will surpass it in salubrity. To the operation of
the same cause, we may doubtless look with confidence for a decided
improvement in personal comeliness and beauty. “It is evident,” says
Dr Jackson, “that the health of a whole community may be so affected
by impurities in water drank by them, as to give a peculiar morbid
expression to their countenances which causes the observant eye of a
traveller to remark it, while he in vain endeavours to account for the
phenomenon. Who has not remarked the expression common in some of our
cities, as in New-York and Boston, which is called a “care worn and
anxious expression.” This expression I will venture to assert, is not
so much the result of “too much care,” as it is of abdominal disease,
produced by the habitual and continued use of impure and unwholesome
water, which has fixed upon us this morbid stamp. I do not know that
the people of the cities in question, are subject to more care than
those in other districts, but I do know that they use every day, in
many forms, a variety of noxous ingredients, which they pump up from
their wells, dissolved in the water, and which enters into every
form of food and drink they use in their houses.” Mrs. Hale, also,
in her excellent Manual “The Good Housekeeper,” remarks, that “hard
water always leaves a mineral matter on the skin, when we use it in
washing, which renders the hands and face rough and liable to chap.
Does not this water, if we drink it, likewise corrode and injure the
fine membranes of the stomach? The Boston people, who constantly use
hard water for all purposes of cookery and drink, certainly have bad
complexions, sallow, dry, and _hard_ looking; and complaints of the
stomach or dyspepsia are very common among them.[16] A Salem gentleman
declared, that when his daughters, who frequently visited at Boston,
passed two or three weeks at a time there, he could see a very material
change in their complexions. At Salem there is plenty of soft water,
and the ladies of that ancient town are famed for their beauty, which
is chiefly owing (its superiority I mean) to a peculiarly fair,
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