Water Purity

"Water's a very peculiar thing—you can't pick it up with a pitchfork. That's why it's been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers."

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860).

"Water needs soil, soil needs vegetation, vegetation needs animals, animals need water — and all these factors compose a single cycle. It is a cycle of which man in a part. If thrust from that cycle, he dies. What he does to parts of that cycle, which he denominates as separate resources, what he does to forests, game, crops, water, affects the whole cycle, and ultimately affects the conditions of his life, or whether he shall have a life."

Earl F. Murphy, Water Purity: A Study in Legal Control of Natural Resources (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 5.