COOL ADVICE. 



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COOL ADVICE 



ONE of the oddest ideas of the confused Brit- 

 ish mind is that it is slightly feeble to mind 

 great heat, at least if the heat be European, and 

 slightly effeminate or over-luxurious to use elabo- 

 rate means for its reduction. We are all devoted 

 to comfort, or at least foreigners think so; but 

 the very men who will spend money, and devote 

 time, and use their whole intelligence, to raise a 

 low thermometer, who put up elaborate and rath- 

 er dangerous systems of hot-water pipes in their 

 houses, and edge doors with gutta-percha, and 

 regulate fires by thermometers and never-ending 

 scoldings, think it slightly ridiculous to mind a 

 degree of heat which inflicts as much discomfort 

 as a frost, and would smile depreciatively if they 

 heard that a neighbor slept with ice-blocks in his 

 room. They will indeed provide for fresh air, 

 because for ventilation they have the excuse of 

 health ; but heat they think it right to accept as 

 an evil, only properly to be encountered by queru- 

 lous endurance. We confess we do not see the 

 sense of the distinction. It is true that in this 

 country respectable people seldom drop down 

 dead from heat and glare, though soldiers, reap- 

 ers, and carters, frequently do, but neither do 

 they drop down dead from cold ; and if it is right 

 to avoid the one sort of discomfort, so it is the 

 other, and with the observatory at Greenwich 

 recording a temperature of 92° in the shade — the 

 highest, according to one newspaper, recorded 

 since the observatory opened its register — and 

 London as hot by night as by day, and the glare 

 continuing unbroken for weeks on end, heat be- 

 comes to many constitutions a serious danger, 

 and to all a disability quite as well worth pre- 

 venting as the disability which arises from cold. 

 It is pitiable to see the misery of people who are 

 at once fat and xanthous, even though we may 

 know that they in particular, being " ready sweat- 

 ers," are almost exempt from the serious conse- 

 quences of heat ; and there are temperaments, 

 more especially among children and sickly wom- 

 en, which are liable to serious injury. It is not 

 sybaritic to avert sea-sickness ; and with men 

 and women of the constitution which resents heat 

 — a peculiarity dependent partly on the state of 

 the lungs and partly on that of the skin — no 

 short fit of sea-sickness will inflict more positive 

 suffering than two or three consecutive nights of 

 sleeplessness from heat. 



It is quite worth while, then, to mention the 



two or three preventives of great heat, especially 

 at night, which in tropical climates Europeans 

 have been taught by long and varied experience 

 to adopt, and which only seem absurd to English- 

 men at home from ignorance of the whole sub- 

 ject. The first and foremost of these is to keep 

 quietly at home out of the sun and its tempo- 

 rarily injurious light. Englishmen in the West 

 or East Indies, or in China,. would be considered 

 simply crazy if they walked about with the ther- 

 mometer marking 100° in the sun, with their necks 

 unprotected, as Londoners have been doing all 

 this week. Experienced residents would tell them 

 that no change of dress, no attention to diet, no 

 carefulness about cleanliness, will give them half 

 the serenity and comfort they will obtain from 

 stopping at home ; that when the thermometer 

 ranges above 80° in the shade, the impact of the 

 sun's rays is positively and directly injurious to 

 the constitution, producing physical deteriorations 

 which may affect them for life. Not only are the 

 effects of a sunstroke permanent, and liable to re- 

 appear on hot days even in cold climates, but the 

 effects of exposure to the sun, though not pro- 

 ducing sunstroke, are often recognizable for years, 

 producing, among other well-ascertained conse- 

 quences, a distinctly separate liability to be af- 

 fected by any form of alcohol — the key, we be- 

 lieve, to the extraordinary mischief drink works 

 among the southern races, and the key also, most 

 fortunately for them, of their instinctive aversion 

 to liquor. It is not the heat, but the light of the 

 sun, which produces these consequences, for a 

 good umbrella prevents them ; and the man who 

 must be abroad in the light of days like last 

 Tuesday should carry one as carefully as he does 

 when he is only afraid of spoiling his hat. Two 

 seconds will sometimes do the mischief, and he 

 had much better bear being told that he is careful 

 of a bad complexion than incur a permanent lia- 

 bility to suffer whenever he takes a glass with a 

 friend. Next to keeping quiet, and as much out 

 of the glare as possible, is the use of cool water 

 in profusion, and that not only to drink, though 

 water-drinking is probably beneficial. Nature 

 makes very few blunders, and the dislike of re- 

 peated draughts of water, which is shared, we 

 believe, even by some physicians, is as irrational 

 as would be a dislike of stokers to put on fuel 

 where fire is needed. All the tropical races in 

 summer drink hard of water — even the Benjralese, 



