44 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from the exhaustion of oxygen, but also from the circumstance that 

 the confined atmosphere may become azotized or surcharged with 

 carbon to the limit of its absorbing powers, just as water, after being 

 saturated with certain percents of salt or sugar, refuses to dissolve any 

 further additions. The act of reinspiring air, which has already been 

 subjected to the process of pulmonary digestion, is thus precisely anal- 

 ogous to the act of a famished animal devouring its own feces, and if 

 performed habitually cannot fail to be attended with equally ruinous 

 consequences. Corruption of the alimentary ducts would surely ensue 

 in the latter (supposed) case, putrefaction of the respiratory organs 

 does follow in the other. Working-men employed in localities whose 

 azotized atmosphere is loaded besides with particles of flying cotton- 

 fibre, metallic dust, or fatty vapors, inspire substances which are just 

 as indigestible to their lungs as mercury and alcohol are to their 

 stomachs, and like these cause a rapid deterioration of the tissues in 

 proximity to which they are deposited. 



The only wonder, then, is how Nature can resist outrages of this 

 kind for any length of time ; and it is a curious reflection to think 

 what amounts of hardship of the primitive sort, such as hunger, 

 fatigue, cold, heat, deprivation of sleep, etc., a healthy savage might 

 accustom himself to, if he tried as hard as the poor children of civili- 

 zation try to wean themselves from their hunger after life-air ! 



Can necessity be we will not say an excuse, but an explanation 

 of such systematic self-ruin ? We must utterly refuse to believe it. 

 Wherever men barter life for bread, there is a violent presumption that 

 they do not know what they are doing ; for against recognized health- 

 destroyers even the poorest of the poor will rebel with a prompitude 

 that vindicates the dignity of human nature under the most abject 

 conditions of bondage. Let a railroad contractor be caught in the 

 trick of adulterating his flour with chalk or his sugar with alum, and 

 see how quickly his navvies will leave him ; or observe how firmly 

 reckless Jack Tar insists on his anti-scorbutic raspberry-vinegar! 

 Miners have left a colliery en masse, because the owner shirked his 

 duty of providing safety-lamps; and the very negro slaves of a South 

 Carolina plantation attempted the life of their master, who stinted 

 their allowance of quinine brandy which his father had issued them to 

 counteract the miasmatic tendencies of the rice-swamp. 



Neither is it possible to suppose that want of hygienic education 

 can be the orisjin of such ignorance ; for Nature does not wait for the 

 scientist to inform her children on questions of such importance. All 

 normal things are good, all evil is abnormal; vice is a consequence of 

 ignorance only in so far as it is a result of perverse education, and the 

 troglodyte-habit is the direct offspring of mediaeval monachism. Un- 

 til after the fourth century of the Christian era, habitual in-door life 

 between closed walls was known only as the worst form of punish- 

 ment. Though the Greeks and Romans were familiar with the maim- 



