PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 753 



PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 



By FELIX L, OSWALD, M. D. 

 OUT-DOOR LIFE. 



" Disease is a hot-house plant.'' IIaller. 



EVERY disease is a protest of Nature against an active or passive 

 violation of her laws. But that protest follows rarely upon a 

 first transgression, never upon trifles ; and life-long sufferings the 

 effects of an incurable injury excepted generally imply that the suf- 

 ferer's mode of life is habitually unnatural in more than one respect. 

 For there is such a thing as vicarious atonement in pathology : a strict 

 observance of any one of the three or four jsrincipal health-laws rarely 

 fails to reward itself by a long immunity from the consequences of 

 otherwise evil habits. Frugality thus counteracts the morbific ten- 

 dency of indolence ; perfect continence may steel even a feeble con- 

 stitution against the effects of hunger and overwork ; and, by avoiding 

 the great vice of intemperance, the Epicureans atoned for a multitude 

 of minor sins. 



But the surest of all natural prophylactics is active exercise in the 

 open air. Air is a part of our daily food and by far the most impor- 

 tant part. A man can live on seven meals a week, and survive the 

 warmest summer day with seven draughts of fresh water, but his sup- 

 ply of gaseous nourishment has to be renewed at least fourteen thou- 

 sand times in the twenty-four hours. Every breath we draw is a 

 draught of fresh oxygen, every emission of breath is an evacuation of 

 gaseous recrements. The purity of our blood depends chiefly on the 

 purity of the air we breathe, for in the laboratory of the lungs the 

 atmospheric air is brought into contact at each respiration with the 

 fluids of the venous and arterial systems, which absorb it and circulate 

 it through the whole body ; in other words, if a man breathes the 

 vitiated atmosphere of a factory all day and of a close bedroom all 

 night, his life-blood is tainted fourteen thousand times in the course of 

 the twenty-four hours with foul vapors, dust, and noxious exhalations. 

 We need not wonder, then, that ill-ventilated dwellings aggravate the 

 evils of so many diseases, nor that pure air should be almost a panacea. 



Out-door life is both a remedy and a preventive of all known dis- 

 orders of the respiratory organs ; consumption, in all but the last stage 

 of the dellqiciicm, can be conquered by transferring the battle-ground 

 from the sick-room to the wilderness of the next mountain-range. 

 Asthma, catarrh, and tubercular phthisis, are unknown among the 

 nomads of the intertropical deserts, as well as among the homeless 

 hunters of our Northwestern Territories. Hunters and herders, who 

 breathe the pure air of the South American pampas, subsist for years 

 VOL. xvni.- 



