the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue
Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,
the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame
des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the
Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic
sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous
voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with
monumental effrontery.

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in
1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st
of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between
1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and
fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of
galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with
hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At
two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the
present day represent forty-eight millions.

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the
beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that
immense question: the sewers of Paris.

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air.
The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but
already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay
situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may
be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a
multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the
Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the
Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water
is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the
earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the
miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence
this bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been
scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In
a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and
as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the
sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The