46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or travelers in a crowded stage-coach will protest if one of their num- 

 ber ventures to open a window after sundown, no matter how glori- 

 ous the night or how oppressive the effluvia of the closed apartment. 

 Pious men they may be, and most anxious to distinguish good from 

 evil, but they never suspect that God's revelations are written in an- 

 other language than that of the Hebrew dogmatist. Here, as else- 

 where, men suppress their instincts instead of their artificial cravings. 

 If we have learned to interpret the fact that a child whose mind is not 

 yet biased by any hearsays is sure to prefer pure and cold air to the 

 miasmatic " comfort " of a close room, the troglodyte-habit will dis- 

 appear, as intemperance will vanish if we recognize the significance of 

 that other fact that to every beginner the taste of alcohol is repul- 

 sive, and that only the tenth or twelfth dosis of the obnoxious sub- 

 stance begins to be relished; just as the Russian stage-conductor 

 relishes the atmosphere of his ambulant dungeon, whatever may have 

 been his feelings of horror on the first trip. 



If ever we recognize a truth which was familiar enough to the an- 

 cients, but seems to have been forgotten for the last ten or twelve 

 centuries, viz., that our noses were given us for some practical pur- 

 pose, the architecture of our dwellings, our factories, school-rooms, and 

 places of worship, will be speedily corrected ; and even the builder of 

 an immigrant-ship will find a way to modify that floating Black Hole 

 of Calcutta called the steerage. Prisons, too, will be modeled after 

 another plan. Our right to diet our criminals on the ineffable mixt- 

 ure of odors which they are now obliged to accept as air depends 

 on the settlement of the question whether the object of punishment is 

 reform or revenge ? In the latter case the means answer the purpose 

 with a vengeance indeed : in the first case there is no more excuse for 

 saturating the lungs of a prisoner with the seeds of tuberculosis than 

 there would be for feeding him on trichinae or inoculating him with 

 the leprosy-virus. 



The exegesis of consumption very nearly justifies Michelet's para- 

 dox that the greatest evils might be easiest avoided. " There is no 

 excuse for famine," says Varnhagen von Ense; "we could all live in 

 clover if we did not misapply a large portion of our arable land to the 

 production of tobacco, opium, and other poisonous weeds, and send 

 ship-loads of our breadstuffs to the distillery. I am sure that if the 

 spontaneous productions of the soil furnished us mountains of grain 

 and rivers of honey, we would still manage to use it up in the manu- 

 facture of intoxicating poisons, and complain of hunger as before. If 

 any one should doubt this, let him reflect on the fact that, while we are 

 surrounded by a respirable atmosphere of more than 800,000,000 cubic 

 miles, civilization has contrived a famine of air! " 



