ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the articulation of new questions about oxidation and the activities of aquatic organisms during the 1882-1884 hearings of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Sewage Discharge and the nature of the revolution in sewage treatment and self-purification that William Dibdin believed he had led. In 1855 the Metropolitan Board had been established with the primary fuction of solving London’s sewage problem. By the mid-1860s it had completed a system of intercepting sewers which led to twin outfalls at Barking and Crossness, on opposite sides of the river about ten miles below central London. The system merely relocated pollution. Much of the sewage did not slip quietly off to sea but oscillated with the tides. More fundamental were the ambiguous natures of basic concepts such as purification and pollution. Biology entered the commission’s hearings, not on the coat-tails of the Schutzenberger process, but through another door.
