754 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on a diet that would endanger the life of a city dweller in a single 

 month. It has been repeatedly obsei'ved that individuals who attained 

 to an extreme old age were generally poor peasants whose avocations 

 required daily labor in the open air, though their habits differed in 

 almost every other respect ; also that the average duration of life in. 

 various countries of the Old World depends not so much on climatic 

 peculiarities or their respective degree of culture as on the chief occu- 

 pation of the inhabitants ; the starved Hindoo outlives the well-fed 

 Parsee merchant, the unkempt Bulgarian enjoys an average longevity 

 of forty-two years to the west Austrian citizen's thirty-five. 



In the cities of the higher latitudes, sedentary occupations in a 

 vitiated atmosphere become often a sort of " second nature " : artisans 

 and shopkeepers, after following their business for a number of years, 

 frequently come to dislike fresh air, as the convent slave, by an anal- 

 ogous suppression of his better instincts, becomes averse to free in- 

 quiry. But this abnormal indolence seldom becomes hereditary per- 

 haps never, if we except the children of inebriate idiots. The mediae- 

 val prejudice against all natural propensities founded on the dogma 

 of innate depravity is, indeed, strikingly refuted by a young child's 

 love of out-door exercise. Without the mediation of supernatural 

 revelators or preternatural bugbears, a healthy boy prefers even the 

 hardships of our northern winter sports to the atmosphere of a com- 

 fortable stove-room, and in summer-time the paradise of childhood is 

 still a tree-garden. No domestic events of our later years can efface 

 the impression of the woodland rambles, buttei'fly hunts, and huckle- 

 berry expeditions of our boyhood : the recollections of our first out- 

 door adventures endure like the mountains and rivers of a promised 

 land whose cities have vanished for ever. 



I have often been asked at what age infants can first be safely 

 exposed to the influence of the open air. My answer is. On the first 

 warm, dry day. There is no reason why a new-born child should not 

 sleep as soundly under the canopy of a garden-tree on a pillow of sun- 

 warmed hay as in the atmosphere of an ill-ventilated nursery. Thou- 

 sands of sickly nurslings, jjining away in the slums of our manu- 

 facturing towns, might be saved by an occasional sun-bath. Aside 

 from its warmth and its chemical influence on vegetal oxygen, sunlight 

 exercises upon certain organisms a vitalizing influence which science 

 has not yet quite explained, but whose effect is illustrated by the con- 

 trast between the weeds of a shady grove and those of the sunlit 

 fields, between the rank grass of a deep valley and the aromatic herb- 

 age of a mountain meadow, as well as by the peculiar wholesome 

 appearance of a " sunburned " person or a sun-ripened fruit. Sunlight 

 is too cheap to become a fashionable remedy, but its hygienic influence 

 can hardly be overrated. Even in the glorious climate of the Latian 

 hills, the Roman Epicureans constructed special solaria glass-cov- 

 ered turrets where they could bask in the full rays of the winter 



