The conservators of the river Lea have control of its entire drainage area, which is about 460 square miles, measured from the East London water intakes, and has a population of 189,287. On this watershed there is but a single town with more than 10,000 inhabitants, this being Lutton near the headwaters of the river, with a population of 30,005. The sewage from Lutton and from seventeen smaller places is treated upon land. No crude sewage is known to be ordinarily discharged into the river. At Hereford, eleven miles above the East London intakes, there is a chemical precipitation plant. The conservators do not regard this treatment as satisfactory, and have recently conducted an expensive lawsuit against the local authorities to compel them to further treat their effluent. The suit was lost, the court holding that no actual injury to health had been shown. It is especially interesting to note that of the thirty-nine places on the Thames and the Lea giving their sewage systematic treatment there is but a single place using chemical precipitation, and there it is not considered satisfactory. Formerly quite a number of these towns used other processes than land treatment, but in every case but Hereford land treatment has been substituted. In regard to the efficiency of the sewage farms, it is believed that in ordinary weather the whole of the sewage percolates through the land, and the inspectors of the Conservancy Boards strongly object to its being allowed to pass over the surface into the streams. The land, however, is for the most part impervious, as compared to Massachusetts and German sewage farms, and in times of heavy storms the land often has all the water it can take without receiving even the ordinary flow of sewage, and much less the increased storm-flow. At such times the sewage either does go over the surface, or perhaps more frequently is discharged directly into the rivers without even a pretence of treatment. The conservators apparently regard this as an unavoidable evil and do not vigorously oppose it. It is the theory that, owing to the increased dilution with the storm-flows, the matter is comparatively harmless, although it would seem that the reduced time required for it to reach the water-works intakes might largely offset the effect of increased dilution.