MODERN TROGLODYTES. 43 



bage-soup like the private soldiers of his guard, and also to surrender 

 some valuables he had concealed on his person, on condition that they 

 would permit him to sleep in open air. One more week of such nausea 

 and headache as the confinement in a closed room had caused him, 

 would force him to commit suicide, he said, and, if his request was 

 refused, God would charge the guilt of the deed on his tormentors. 

 After taking due precautions against all possibility of escape, they 

 permitted him to sleep on the platform in front of the guard-house; 

 and Colonel Darapski, the commander of the city, informed his govern- 

 ment in the following spring that the health and general behavior 

 of his prisoner were excellent, but he had slept in open air every one 

 of the last kundi'ed nights, with no other covering but his own worn- 

 out mantle, and a woollen cap he had purchased from a soldier of the 

 guard to keep his turban from getting soiled by mud and rain. 



General Sam Houston, the liberator of Texas, who had exiled him- 

 self from his native State in early manhood, and passed long years, 

 not as a captive, but as a voluntary companion of the Cherokee Indians, 

 was ever afterward unable to prolong his presence in a crowded hall 

 or ill-ventilated room beyond ten or twelve minutes, and described 

 his sensation on entering such a locality as one of "uneasiness, increas- 

 ing to positive alarm, such as a mouse may be supposed to feel under 

 an air-pump." 



The cause of this uneasiness is less mysterious than our nature's 

 wonderful power of adaptation that can help us ever to overcome it. 

 The elementary changes in the human body are going on with such 

 rapidity that the waste of tissue and organic fluids is only partially 

 retrieved by the digestible part of the substances which we feed 

 to the abdominal department of our laboratory twice or thrice in 

 twenty-four hours, The difference is made up by the labors of the 

 upper or pectoral department, which renews its supply of raw mate- 

 rial independently, or even in spite of our will, twenty times per 

 minute, or 70,000 times in twenty-four hours ! With every breath 

 we draw we take into our lungs about one pint of air, so that the 

 quantity of gaseous food thus consumed by the body amounts in a 

 day to 675 cubic feet. T'ne truth, then, is that eating and drinking 

 may be considered as secondary or supplementary functions in the 

 complicated process performed by that living engine called the animal 

 body, while the more important task falls to the share of the lungs. 

 The stomach may suspend its labors entirely for twenty-four hours 

 without serious detriment to the system, and for two or three days 

 without endangering life, while the work of respiration cannot be 

 interrupted for six minutes without fatal consequences. 



The first object of respiration is to introduce elements needed in 

 the preparation of blood, the second to remove gaseous carbon and 

 other secretions of the air-cells. The deleterious consequences, there- 

 fore, of breathing the same air over and over again arise not only 



