288 STATE BOAKI) OF AGRICULTURE. 



ihureof just as reasonably insures disease. "But anything is good enough for 

 a hog." Man builds for himself a roomy mansion, for liis horse and cow a 

 good warm stable, for his sheep a clean, warm ])lace, and says, "Mr. Hog, 

 you get into that filthy den, eat and grow fat." By and bv sickness roaches 

 liis neighborhood, his hogs die as if tiiey were disgusted with tliis earth, as 

 doubtless they are. "I've got the cholera," he says; and then he wonders 

 again why it is that hogs die, the strong and hardy hog, while his sheep go in 

 and out and grow fat. The sheep is furnished the purest of watci', the hog 

 may drink from its own cess-pool. Why, 1 admire the pluck of the animal 

 that dies to spite a man that uses it thus ! 



But of even more importance than the food we eat is the air we breathe ; 

 and yet 1 have seen hogs crowded together under a low roof or barn, or in a 

 Glthy pen where the poison odors were rising so thick that it would give a man 

 a chronic inllammation of the stomach to be there long enough to feed, and 

 have seen those hogs drawn out, one by one, dead. The owner said " cholera," 

 and no doubt wonders why the kind leather sent sucii pestilential scourges on 

 the goods of his children. 



Tlie necessity for having pure air may be readily understood. The blood, 

 loaded with the waste of the system, broken down tissue, etc., from all parts of 

 the ))ody, is conveyed to the lungs to be purified and made ready for further 

 use in the system. This purification when in contact with the air in the lungs 

 consists in giving off the poisonous waste to the air and taking up of pure oxy- 

 gen from the air. Thus in breathing we deprive air of its oxygen and give in 

 its place carbonic acid. The longer we breathe the air of a confined space, the 

 more loaded with the latter it becomes, the less of the former it has. A def- 

 inite amount of oxygen is needed by the blood from each inspiration. Hence 

 this impure air is bad in a double sense : First, it does not supply the blood 

 with the means for doing its work of regeneration in the system; Second, in 

 its place it does supply the blood with the poisonous exhalation thrown off until 

 it becomes gorged. Then this diirk, swollen mass of corruption begins its 

 journey and goes through the system just as if it were pure and health-giving 

 blood. The brain receives its portion of the poison, the stomach its portion, 

 the muscles their portion — not one part of the body but that becomes just fit- 

 ted for the reception of any floating germs of a contagious scourge; aye, for 

 the generation of almost any malignant disease. Now, if this be the truth, we 

 would not expect that scourges would necessarily be confined to the hog. And 

 is this the case? Whenever man violates those immutable laws of health, he 

 has to suffer. If the man allows his air or drink or food to become polluted 

 he has to suffer for it. Need I mention stricken Memphis and Holly Springs 

 and New Orleans? Some of us know what it is to have a Memphis in our 

 swine yard. 



The essayist enforced the lesson of proper sanitary surroundings for swine 

 from the history of cholera. In the New Orleans epidemic of 1853 the district 

 which suffered more than double any other portion of the city had " a series of 

 low, crowded, and filthy pest houses, inhabited by the lowest class of people. 

 The proportion of death here was 542 to 1,000." They lived "like liogs" 

 and died like hogs. In the visitation of the fever to British Guiana in 1852-3 

 its deadliest effects were in the "damp, low, crowded places, and tlie neigh- 

 borhood of putrid exhalations." Jameson's description of cholera in the Mar- 

 quis of Hastings' camp on the banks of the Scinde in India, in 1846, says: 

 " Here 9,000 were carried off in the course of a single week, the disease rapidly 



