CHAPTER II
THE WONDERFUL DITCH
In one of those rhetorical outbursts to which even the subject of sanitary engineering had power to provoke him, Victor Hugo once passionately exclaimed, "A sewer is a misunderstanding!" So acutely did he feel the estrangement which has arisen between men and those fertilising agents which he treats for the most part as mere nuisances instead of entertaining them as friends and allies. The analogy may at first sight seem a fanciful one, but the isthmus has always appeared to me to resemble the drainpipe, as being a misunderstanding—not, indeed, on the part of man, who does his best to remove it, but on that of Nature. For it divorces things
