232 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Noon at the Village Market, Costa Rica. 



more oxygen is 

 organs in the 



are beneficial to the majority of patients. The most important of 

 these can be briefly stated: The number of the blood red corpuscles 

 increases as the air becomes rarer. The main office of the red cor- 

 puscles is the absorption of oxygen in the lungs and the carrying of it 

 into the whole body, wherever heat and power are to be generated. 



There are over two millions red 

 corpuscles in one drop of the blood 

 of a healthy person. In anaemia 

 and connected states, that number 

 often falls to one half of its value. 

 Life in rarefied air results in the 

 opposite state. After the adapta- 

 tion period is over, a considerable 

 increase in the number of red 

 corpuscles, coinciding with more 

 frequent and deeper aspirations, 

 causes the paradoxical result, that 

 brought to the 

 irefied mountain 

 air than in the denser medium, at sea-level. 



The scientist, Viault, was the first to notice that there was an ex- 

 traordinary number of red corpuscles in the blood of the inhabitants of 

 the high plateaus of Peru. Careful determinations led him to the con- 

 clusion that the average increase 

 was from 5,000,000 per cubic milli- 

 meter in the blood of a man living 

 at sea-level, to 8,000,000 after a 

 stay of three weeks at an altitude 

 of some eight thousand feet. In 

 their book, La vie sur les hauts 

 plateaux, the Doctors Herrera and 

 Lope, of the city of Mexico, reached 

 a similar conclusion. In Europe, 

 Egger experimented on Monte 

 Eosa (6,201 feet), and found that 

 the red corpuscles increased, on the 

 average, 17 per cent, in two weeks. 

 Karcher, Sutter, Veillon, experi- 

 menting on lower altitudes (3,452, 

 3,232, 2,297 feet), still found a notable increase of the red corpuscles. 

 'Wolff and Koeppe noticed it again on the Eeyboldsgrun, which is only 

 2,300 feet high. In 1896, Leuch published in the Korrespondenzblatt 

 f. Schweitzer Aerzte, the results of a most accurate and painstaking 

 study on the changes undergone by the blood of anaemic school chil- 



Shade and Light Effects at a High Alti- 

 tude, Carpenteria Mountain. 



