ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the benevolent mid-Victorian outlook from which the concept of biological purification emerged, the development of the concept by Justus Liebig, the application of the idea of biological purification as a principle of natural theology and a defense of pollution, and its technological application in sewage farming. It describes the failure of the biological purification concept to inspire research and the reasons for its rejection by British scientists during the 1870s and 1880s. A world in which the essential, inevitable, continual, and ubiquitous process of organic decomposition was regarded as invariably offensive and harmful, and frequently lethal, was unacceptable to many British sanitarians. The argument that rivers were purified biologically had great utility for those who wished to uphold the safety of polluted water supplies or for those who contended that the sewage they put into a river was quickly rendered harmless by cooperating natural agencies.
