3i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



his family ease and comfort, and hoarded ; he knows neither art, nor 

 literature, nor science, but he has hoarded ; he lives a life scarcely 

 better than that of the beast of the field, but he has hoarded ; his 

 savings have nourished no industries, nor rewarded any art, nor pro- 

 moted any intellectual end, and he himself has done his best by mere 

 restriction to limit the productive resources of his land but having 

 saved and hoarded with the instinct with which a dog hides a bone 

 he is held up for admiration ! This sort of thing fully explains the 

 shudder with which people generally hear the name of political econ- 

 omy. It is true, there must be economy ; there must be saving; but 

 there is economy and economy. The real cause of the more prosper- 

 ous condition of France is not starved existence but sustained and 

 unspeculative production. Tliere is less concentration there, less wild 

 overtrading ; there are more difiiision and old-fashioned relation of 

 production to consumption. 



This equable and uniform production is like a stream that is fed 

 by ten thousand springs and many affluents ; it flows steadily on, calm, 

 perennial, beneficent : but our speculative and spasmodic production 

 is too much like a mountain-river, that at one season comes down in a 

 flood and deluges the land, at another subsides into a rivulet, and all 

 the land is parched. 



ATMOSPHEEIC PKESSUEE AND LIFE.' 



Bt Dr. PAUL BERT, 



PEOFESSOE IN THE PAEIS FACULTY OF SCIENCES. 



THE great influence that may be exerted upon living beings by 

 atmospheric pressure is now questioned by none, and there is 

 even a disposition to exaggerate its importance. If the barometric 

 column rises or falls a few millimetres, nervous people afiected with 

 the asthma perceive phenomena, whether of a beneficial or of a 

 noxious kind, which they do not hesitate to attribute to the weight 

 or to the lightness of the atmosphere. But if this were the only 

 cause of their sensations, then they should experience the same symp- 

 toms whenever they subject themselves to equal variations of pressure, 

 as in passing from the level of the sea to a point only a few feet above 



"i 



Rarefied Air. As every one knows, in propoilion as we ascend 

 from the sea-level, the barometric pressure diminishes at the rate of 

 about one centimetre per 100 metres of vertical ascent. And this dim- 

 inution is progressive : suppose that at the sea-level the pressure is 76 

 centimetres, then it will be 66 centimetres at the height of 1,123 metres 



' Translated from the French by J. Fitzgerald, A. M. 



