POPULAR ERRORS. 123 



ceeding night he may take a severe one under a load of covering, by 

 the accidental circumstance of the door or window being left open, or 

 the curtain undrawn. By the same rule, a person will travel through a 

 whiter's day on the outside of a coach, and encounter all its incle- 

 mency of wind and snow, with his hands and feet benumbed, and a 

 sense of coldness prevailing his whole frame, and yet take no cold ; 

 but if the same person, on his return, takes his seat in the inside of 

 the same coach, and with the same clotliing upon him in which he 

 before travelled on the outside, and, if thus warm and muffled up, he 

 exposes himself to a current o{ air admitted through the open windows, 

 the chance is great indeed that he will take it. In illustration of 

 the same fact of the exemption of persons from taking cold who are 

 exposed to the operation of long-continued cold applied to the whole 

 body as the traveller in a winter's day, I may remind you of the ac- 

 cident which befel one of our townsmen, Mr. Appelyard, who, some 

 years ago, was wrecked from a boat hi the H umber, and was only 

 picked up after being immersed five hours in the water, and though 

 chilled almost to a degree of insensibility, was able, nevertheless, tosleep 

 sound through the night, and rise to his breakfast in the morning with- 

 out an ailment of any kind. His security arose from the whole body 

 being chilled ; for had he, during that period or any part of it, sat 

 with his legs only in the water, whilst with clothing and other means 

 the rest of his person had been kept wann, a cold would have been 

 taken that in all probability would have proved fatal to him. It is 

 from this principle that the beggar's child, with its naked feet and its 

 scanty and tattered gannents, suffers hourly in his feelings from cold, 

 but takes none, whilst the child of the affluent, with its ample clothing 

 of wool and fur, is repeatedly the subject of it. 



And here let me re-state the fact, that it matters not, as to the 

 effect produced, whether the person so heated be in a coach with a 

 current of air passing through it, or standing in a narrow passage through 

 which a summer breeze is blowing, or stands upon a damp and cold 

 pavement, or at the open window of a warm apartment, or meets the 

 cold air of the street after sitting near the fire of a friend on a morning 

 call, and covered during her visit with a thickly lined cloak and its 

 appendages of muflfand tippet. In all these cases the cause is the 

 same, and this cause is the excess in the heat of the body, and the 

 partial abstraction of it by a chilling agent directed to a part, as to the 



