THE REMEDIES OF NATURE. 631 



that their boys would desert and sleep in a ditch rather than endure 

 the horrors of an air-tight sweat-box ; so the windows are partially- 

 opened. The long, warm days also offer increased opportunities for 

 out-door rambles. In midsummer, therefore, Nature rallies once more. 

 But not always. There are people whose prejudices can not be 

 shaken by experience, and in their households a perennial system of 

 air-poisoning overcomes the redeeming tendencies of out-door life, as 

 the subtile mixtures of La Brinvilliers overcame the iron constitution 

 of her last husband. Their children snuffle the year round ; no cough- 

 medicine avails, no flannels and wrappers, even in the dog-days ; and 

 the evil is ascribed to " dampness," when the cold-air theory becomes 

 at last too evidently preposterous. 



To an unprejudiced observer, though, that theory is equally un- 

 tenable in the coldest month of the year. No man can freeze himself 

 into a catarrh. In cold weather the hospitals of our Northern cities 

 sometimes receive patients with both feet and both hands frozen, with 

 frost-bitten ears and frost-sore eyes, but without a trace of a ca- 

 tarrhal affection. Duck-hunters may wade all day in a frozen swamp 

 without affecting the functions of their respiratory organs. Ice-cut- 

 ters not rarely come in for an involuntary plunge-bath, and are obliged 

 to let their clothes dry on their backs : it may result in a bowel-com- 

 plaint, but no catarrh. Prolonged exposure to a cold storm may in 

 rare cases induce a true pleural fever, a very troublesome affection, but 

 as different from a " cold " as a headache is from a toothache the 

 upper air-passages remain unaffected. Sudden transition from heat to 

 cold does not change the result. In winter the " pullers " of a rolling- 

 mill have often to pass ten times an hour from the immediate neigh- 

 borhood of a furnace to the chill draught of the open air ; their skin 

 becomes as rough as an armadillo's, their hair becomes grizzly or lead- 

 colored ; but no catarrh. On my last visit to Mexico, I ascended the 

 peak of Orizaba from the south side, and reached the crater bathed in 

 perspiration ; and, following the guide across to the northwest slope, 

 we were for ten minutes exposed to an ice-storm that swept the sum- 

 mit in blasts of fitful fury. Two of my companions, a boy of sixteen 

 and an old army-surgeon, were not used to mountain-climbing, and 

 could hardly walk when we got back to our camp in the foot-hills, but 

 our lungs were none the worse for the adventure. Dr. Franklin, who, 

 like Bacon and Goethe, had the gift of anticipative intuitions, seems 

 to have suspected the mistake of the cold-air fallacy. " I shall not 

 attempt to explain," says he, "why damp clothes occasion colds, rather 

 than wet ones, because I doubt the fact ; I believe that neither the 

 one nor the other contributes to this effect, and that the causes of colds 

 are totally independent of wet and even of cold " (" Miscellaneous 

 Works," p. 216). 



" I have, upon the approach of colder weather, removed my under- 

 garments," says Dr. Page, " and have then attended to my out-door 



