THE
BERKEFELD-FILTER.
No water ought to be employed for drinking or culinary purposes by human beings, which has not been perfectly purified. We know that some,
at least, of the most serious of the zymotic diseases
are most commonly transmitted by their germs
gaining access to, and polluting the water. There
are two methods of sterilization, either boiling or
filtering the water.
?
The process of boiling kills the germs, but the
boiled water is rendered unpalatable, owing to the process expelling the dissolved gases which help to give the water its gratifying taste and freshness. Nevertheless the boiling was used because no filter-
ing medium existed whose pores were sufficiently minute to be impassable by the minute germs, but
sufficiently numerous to give a practicable quantity
of water.
The Berkefeld-Filter, however, fulfills both requirements perfectly and abundantly. The
photograph of a particle of the filtering material as seen under the microscope, magnified
Soo times, shows ladder-like and interlacing skeletons of diatomacen, giving an enormous
zumber of exceedingly small pores, thus according a free passage for the liquid and at
the game time arresting all minute suspended organic or inorganic matter on the surface frol (which the deposits can be easily washed or brushed away.
The Berkefeld-Filter has been treated in nearly all Hygienic Institutes and many
spitals, and is in use in the Royal Institute for Infective Diseases, Berlin; City Hospital,
rlin; Hygienic Institutes of the Universities of Berlin, Bologna, Breslau, Florence, Koenigs- erg, Leipzig, Marburg, Rostock, etc.
Nearly all principal Newspapers and Periodicals have written favorable articles of the
Berkefeld-Filter.
THE BERKEFELD-FILTER.
P. T. O.