WARMING AND VENTILATING OF DWELLINGS. 835 



warmed to such an extent that doors and windows are constantly- 

 opened, and this in spite of the exceptionally cold and damp na- 

 ture of the surrounding soil and the exposed position the house 

 occupies. 



Over and above all these considerations M. Somesco maintains 

 he has realized the ideal that a dwelling should be like our clothes, 

 only not portable, but permeable. It should be warm, because it 

 should be made of materials that are bad conductors of heat. 

 Indoors we should possess means of counteracting the chilling 

 effect of the outer air. We ought to live indoors as we live out 

 of doors, and we should consider our house merely as if it were an 

 extra great-coat. The coat, if porous, will be warm and healthy. 

 One of the reasons, he says, why we are apt to feel uncomfortable 

 when it rains is that the rain blocks up the porosity of the walls, 

 and that, too, on the windward side. As for microbes, M. Somes- 

 co proudly pointed to the artistic drapery which covered the bare 

 bricks of his porous walls. " These are," he exclaimed, " my mi- 

 crobe traps. If I have any reason to believe that injurious 

 microbes have been introduced into my house, I know pretty well 

 where to find them. It would take but little time or trouble to 

 unhook all this drapery, to put it into the disinfecting stove, and 

 there superheated steam under pressure, without injuring the 

 cloth, would assuredly kill the microbes. Even without these 

 artificial methods of purification, if the walls were porous, oxygen 

 would go wherever the microbe went, and Nature would effect its 

 own cure." How far a porous wall can filter and purify air, as 

 earth filters and purifies sewage, is a matter which has not yet 

 been investigated. He is of opinion that if we leave our walls 

 alone, and do not block them up with paint and paper, we have 

 for ordinary house walls in ordinary weather two cubic feet of 

 air going through every square foot of wall in the course of an 

 hour, and this is probably enough to insure the sufficient oxida- 

 tion, if it goes on at all, of the materials of which the wall is 

 made. Further, the porosity of the walls must also materially 

 assist in the ventilation of the room which they surround. It 

 was M. Somesco's delight to think that even when the doors and 

 windows of his house were shut the pure air of his garden was 

 blown upon him through the porous walls. 



M. Somesco's house can, of course, only be taken as an experi- 

 ment. The principles of which it is a practical application have 

 not yet been adopted by the public. Already a private house is 

 in the course of construction at Beauvais built on the same prin- 

 ciples, and they are also to be applied to the military hospital at 

 Madrid. To sum up these new theories and methods, the teach- 

 ings of M. Trelat, the practical experiments of M. Somesco, sug- 

 gest that the natural porosity of our walls, especially the outer 



