484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the system, where they would have been duly eliminated and dis* 

 charged. These localities are the nuclei of disease, and here are de- 

 posited the tubercle and the germs of death. 



This is the result of disuse the farmer's neglected spot, the recep- 

 tacle of odds and ends, never ploughed nor cared for, where weeds run 

 riot, and whence every light-winged breeze wafts the myriad progeny 

 of evil all over the adjoining fields. 



How aggravated is this condition when the air, too, is deteriorated, 

 full of miasm and pestilence ! See the air of the swampy, undrained 

 country, laden with agues and typhus, or the city atmosphere, shut in 

 from sun and breeze, respired over and over again by the healthy and 

 the sickly, by animals of every description, full of the dust of every 

 production of the world, with the fumes of every volatile liquid and 

 deleterious gas ! 



When we contrast this single vital element as it enters into the 

 life of the modern man, compared with its free use by the men of the 

 past, who are reported to have lived to a great age in health and com- 

 parative vigor, does there not seem to be almost reason enough for it 

 in this fact alone ? 



The Greeks, like all Eastern nations, lived in the open air. The pa- 

 triarchs of the Bible lived in tents. Even those of later date, who lived 

 in the small cities of former days, occupied no tightly-glazed, win- 

 dowed apartments, but slept a great part of the time on the unbedewed 

 roofs of their houses, covered only by the radiance of the gentle 

 moon and the twinkling stars. 



In those days the heat came from the vigor of the system, and ex- 

 ercise at some useful employment, while wide-mouthed, gaping chim- 

 neys, consuming huge logs of timber, carried away, on their upward 

 draught (with most of the heat indeed), the air wasted by respiration. 



Nor was pure air a royal prerogative ; for, down to quite recent 

 times, these immense chimneys were the gates to health to our own an- 

 cestors, and we ourselves learned somewhat of our early astronomy by 

 gazing at the stars through these huge telescopes, thickly hung around 

 with the flitches of bacon and fat hams quietly absorbing the pyroligne- 

 ous acids from the consuming logs of oak and walnut burning below. 



Contrast those long winter nights in rooms through whose open 

 cracks the wintry blast not unfrequently blew out the candle by whose 

 dim light we groped our shivering way to bed ; contrast them with 

 the air we breathe, heated by the unceasing furnace, poisoned by ever- 

 present tobacco-smoke, and at the best loaded with the impurities of a 

 city, and passing on its course from house to house, constantly becom- 

 ing more and more impure. 



Sunlight. This portion of the subject cannot be honestly left 

 without some allusion to the marked influence which the sun has upon 

 all Nature, both animate and inanimate. Hygienic writers have gener- 

 ally most astonishingly ignored the powerful effects of this luminary, 



