The Influence of Water

The Hundred Year Club Discusses Its Influence Upon Health and Longevity.

The Hundred Year Club held its monthly meeting at the Hotel Majestic, Seventy-second street and Central Park West, last evening. Dr. A. L. Wood read a paper, entitled, "The Influence of Water Upon Health and Longevity." The discussion following was opened by Dr. W. R. C. Latson, editor of Health Culture, followed by Mrs. Leon Harvier, the Rev. Joseph Newton Hallock, D. D. Dr. F. E. West, professor of clinical medicine Long Island College Hospital; Dr. Olive F. McCune, Dr. David Allyn Gorton and by Dr. M. L. Holbrook, formerly professor of hygiene, New York Medical College. George W. Dithridge is secretary and Dr. Carleton Simon, president of the club.

The Rev. Joseph Newton Hallock, D. D., editor of The Christian Work, said in part:

"When I mentioned that pure water was to be the subject of discussion at this meeting, a friend remarked, 'Pure water. Why there's nothing in it.' I think we can easily succeed in showing that there may be altogether too much in it; at least for the health of those who drink it, or use it internally in any way. Why there have been times when our city water, in Brooklyn at least, and I doubt not here in New York, has been so offensive to the sight, taste and smell as to be unfit, even for bathing purposes. At such times the interested health authorities sometimes get out signed certificates, purporting to come from some chemist or other who has made an examination of the water, and they print these truthful certificates in the papers to prove that the water is all right, and particularly good and wholesome! But the papers also print the news, and only the other day they mentioned as a fact, and I have no reason to doubt it, that a two headed snake found plenty of nourishment so long as it was left in the city water, and that it was only after it was taken from it that it began to droop. Who wants to drink water, so full of animalculae and vermin that snakes can thrive and grow in it? Will a printed certificate, from interested parties, that such water is good and wholesome, cleanse such filthy stuff of its disease bearing germs, microbes and snakes? Why I would as soon accept as gospel truth all the snake stories printed in our excellent and veracious contemporary, the New York Sun, on the ground that 'If you see it in the Sun it's so,' as to give the least credence to such stuff.

"But to return to our subject, or rather to continue it, for vermin, microbes and snakes all belong to the same general category. When I was a boy, I spent the first sixteen years of my life on a farm. We had many horses, and it was a part of my business to take the horses to a sort of a swampy pool or watering place, covered with green slime, and full of frogs and tadpoles, from which they took their daily draught. One day I tried to water the horses at a well of pure water and to my surprise they refused to drink. So accustomed had they become to the slime, frogs and tadpoles that they couldn't seem to enjoy anything else! I have often thought of those horses since I came here to the great City of New York, and noticed the strange contentment with which most city people swallow the Ridgewood and Croton waters, regardless of what they contain. We make a great outcry about the awful effects of intoxicating drinks here in the city, and so we ought, but no less an authority than the great electrician, Nikola Tesla, gives it as his honest conviction that where one life is lost by intoxicating drink, a score or more are actually killed by the use of impure water, to say nothing of the thousands whose health is seriously affected, and whose lives are materially shortened by its use.