The ideal water in appearance is distilled water, which is perfectly clear and limpid, and has a slight blue color. When other waters are compared with it, the divergences in color from the color of distilled water are measured, and not the absolute colors of the waters. Many spring waters and filtered waters are indistinguishable in appearance from distilled water.

Public water-supplies from surface sources contain two substances or classes of substances which injure their appearance, namely, peaty coloring matters, and mud. Waters discolored by peaty matters are most common in New England and in certain parts of the Northwest, while muddy waters are found almost everywhere, but of different degrees of muddiness, according to the physical conditions of the water-sheds from which they are obtained.

Muddy waters are often spoken of as colored waters, and in a sense this is correct where the mud consists of clays or other materials having distinct colors; but it is more convenient to classify impurities of this kind as turbidities only, and to limit the term colored waters to those waters containing in solution vegetable matters which color them.

The removal of either color or turbidity may be called clarification.

Colored waters are usually drawn from water-sheds where the underlying rock is hard and does not rapidly disintegrate, and where the soils are firm and sandy, and especially from swamps. The water here comes in contact with peat or muck, which colors it, but is so firm as not to be washed by flood flows, and so does not cause turbidity.

Large parts of the United States have for rock foundations shales or other soft materials which readily disintegrate when exposed, and which form clayey soils readily washed by hard rains. Waters from such watersheds are generally turbid and very rarely colored. In fact a water carrying much clay in suspension is usually found colorless when the clay is removed, even if it were originally colored. It thus happens that waters which are colored and turbid at the same time hardly exist in nature.

Color-producing matters and turbidity-producing matters are different in their natures, and the methods which must be used to remove them are different.