The scientist Michael Faraday described the situation in a letter to "The Times" in July 1855: shocked at the state of the Thames, he dropped pieces of white paper into the river to "test the degree of opacity". His conclusion was that "Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. ... The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer." The smell from the river was so bad that in 1857 the government poured chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid into the waterway to ease the stench.