Country Life
SUGAR AND Flan.
IT may be allowable to hold that the Wye is the loveliest and one of the purest of our rivers. It is of the West westerly, dividing the greenest fields and woods with its broad pools and shallows. It is nowhere more talkative of England than near Hereford ; and by way of expressing their appreciation of its purity fifty-pound salmon have recently been basking even in upper pools. That the Wye was in any danger of going the way of the dead rivers, as we may call them, no one ever imagined. But a threat has arisen. A sugar factory is to be built near Hereford. Now any sugar factory is a welcome addition to home-produced wealth. Sugar has saved agriculture in many an English district, as all over the Continent. But from the factory, otherwise wholly beneficent, flows out a chemical fluid that is or may be the death of fish, even of coarse fish, as examples from the Eastern Counties' canals are said to prove. If this effluent should poison the Wye, the factory would be self-condemned, would do much less good than harm. It is, however, altogether absurd to suppose that science is not sufficiently advanced to be able to purify such an effluent. Indeed, we know that it can in this case be effectively screened or filtered.
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