146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



our veins till we would gladly part with our hereditary cuticle, cus- 

 tom obliges us to invest ourselves in double and threefold garments- 

 air-tight if not water-proof, some of them— which intensify the effects 

 of the atmospheric heat by the retained animal warmth of our own 

 bodies, and confine, not perspiration, but the benefits of perspiration, 

 to the small uncovered portion of our skin. 



Our cities are atmospheric bake-ovens. They exclude the horizontal 

 air-currents that sweep freely through the shady arcades of the forest, 

 but they admit sunlight and retain their self-created heat, their dust, 

 and their sudorific vapors. We have inherited, the antique passion for 

 whitewashed houses and stone fences that reflect the sun's rays with a 

 distressing glare, while we have abolished the intramural gardens and 

 free public baths that alleviated the summer sufferings of the ancient 

 Mediterranean cities ; but our hyperborean diet is perhaps a still more 



prolific source of evil. 



The experience of all tropical and sub-tropical nations has taught 

 them to avoid animal food and fat, and to counteract the influence of a 

 sultry climate by cooling, non-stimulating drinks and fruit, for a three 

 or four years' neglect of these precautions is sure to undermine the 

 soundest constitution, as demonstrated by the fate of countless em- 

 ployes of the East Indian administration, who left Great Britam as 

 models of Saxon or Celtic vis virilis, and returned as tremulous in- 

 valids after a few hundred beefsteak-and-ale dinners in the atmos- 

 phere of the Lower Ganges Valley. The advent of our autumnal night 

 frosts and bracing north winds saves most of us from the ultimate con- 

 sequences of this East Indian malady, but not one man in a thousand 

 escapes the pro tempore penalties of living through the tropical quar- 

 ter of the solar year as if he were fighting the battle of life against 

 an arctic snow-storm. Cold air is a tonic and antiseptic, and under its 

 influence many substances which Nature never intended for our food 

 become healthy or at least digestible, for a Kamtchatka fisherman 

 can swallow as his daily ration a dose of blubber and brandy that 

 would kill seven Hindoos. The pork-steaks and bitters that feed the 

 fire of life in December smother it in August like so much incombus- 

 tible rubbish, or evolve fumes that obscure its brightness, till we yearn 

 for the equinoctial gale like a becalmed mariner in a fog, or take refuge 

 from hypochondria in the summerless heights of a mountain-region ; 

 and, if starvation were not so often superadded to the cold and the 

 darkness of the season of short days and long nights, it would be very 

 doubtful if the bitterest winter sorrows of the children of Nature could 

 compare with the self-inflicted summer martyrdom of a European or 

 North American dyspeptic. For languor, dull headaches, nausea, and 

 troubled dreams, though singly and momentarily no very serious evils, 

 can aggregate in a sum of misery that has induced all northern nations 

 to make a high temperature the chief characteristic of the pit of tor- 

 ment. 



