ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the three phases of the biologicization of water quality issues in Britain and examines the incorporation of biology in water politics. Theya are: populism in water analysis 1875-1885, biology returns to water analysis, 1875-1885 and Percy Frankland and the politics of bacteriological water analysis. The techniques and interpretive principles of water analysis were transformed; new understandings of the natural and artificial mechanisms of purification emerged. Biology was slow to shake off sensationalism. By the late 1880s a very different sort of biology had replaced it. This was bacteriology, specifically the counting of bacterial colonies on a culture plate. The techniques for culturing bacteria developed by Robert Koch were introduced to the British scientific public in 1884. Several British sanitarians, notably Robert Angus Smith, had advocated culturing techniques of various sorts prior to 1884, but such practices had not become widespread. Pathogens also struggled for existence against aquatic predators.
