House drainage into the sewers was, however, either lamentably deficient or non-existent, and cesspools abounded--abounded so freely that "parts of the City might be described as having a cesspool-city excavated beneath it." "It requires," reported Dr. Simon to his employers, "little medical knowledge to understand that animals will scarcely thrive in an atmosphere of their own decomposing excrements; yet such, strictly and literally speaking, is the air which a very large proportion of the inhabitants of the City are condemned to breathe.... In some instances, where the basement storey of a house is tenanted, the cesspool lies, perhaps merely boarded over, close beneath the feet of a family of human beings whom it surrounds uninterruptedly, whether they wake or sleep, with its foetid pollution and poison." For such evils, and such a state of things, he said, house drainage, with effective water supply, were the remedies which could alone avail; and it was only in the Session of 1848 that the authority to secure and enforce these remedies was vested by the Legislature in any public body whatsoever. The City was fortunately included, but the metropolis, with its two and a half millions of inhabitants, was unfortunately not. The unrestricted supply of water, he pointed out, was the first essential of decency, of comfort, and of health; no civilisation of the poorer classes could exist without it; and any limitation to its use in the metropolis was a barrier which must maintain thousands in a state of the most unwholesome filth and degradation. Even in the City, however, the supply of water was but "a fraction of what it should have been, and thousands of the population inhabited houses which had no supply of it." Nor was what was supplied by the Water Companies much to boast of. "The waters were conducted from their sources in open channels; they received in a large measure the surface-washing, the drainage, and even the sewage of the country through which they passed; they derived casual impurities from bathers and barges, and on their arrival were, after a short subsidence in reservoirs, distributed without filtration to the public." In some cases the scanty distribution was from a stand-pipe in a court or alley, for a very short time of the day. In other cases the water was delivered into butts or cisterns. Their condition is thus described:--