!)76 Summary and Conclusions 



he looked at me, I thought I could see that he was conscious of his 

 critical condition. 



He had told me a few weeks before that a second attack of 

 meningitis would bring certain death, since it is rare that one sur- 

 vives the first attack I cannot help believing that the elevation 



had a good deal to do with the aggravation of the symptoms; he had 

 been exposed to the same cold in the Pamir expedition, and yet, the 

 elevation being less, he had experienced no harm. 



I think that Capt. Trutter is right. I do not think that Dr. 

 Stoliczka succumbed to the influence of the rarefied air alone; 

 under the influence of an intense cold, he was probably attacked 

 by spinal meningitis complicated with broncho-pneumonia; but the 

 immediate prostration and death in two days should be attributed 

 to a complication unknown at ordinary levels. I certainly believe 

 that a lessening in the extent or the soundness of the alveolar 

 membrane, which at sea level would have brought only a slight 

 ailment, must have brought death by asphyxia in regions where 

 oxygen absorption was already reduced to a minimum. We shall 

 return to these data in the following subchapter. 



An anatomist of high rank, who has just published a con- 

 siderable work on the respiratory apparatus of birds, tried, among 

 very interesting observations on the operation of this apparatus, to 

 explain the singular immunity which birds of lofty flight enjoy with 

 reference to the effects of rarefied air. In the opinion of M. Cam- 

 pana, 20 it is all explained by the super-activity given to the re- 

 spiratory phenomena by the muscular acts of flight; so, he says, 

 alluding to the experiments in which I saw hawks hardly less 

 susceptible to decompression than the other birds: 



I should unhesitatingly admit that these same condors, or better 

 yet, condors taken from a menagerie, might very well be subject to 

 all these functional disturbances, if, instead of rising freely in flight, 

 they shared in a passive manner in the ascent of a balloon, kept cap- 

 tive and motionless in a cage, in the bottom of the basket. For all 

 the greater reason, if one subjected them to decompression in closed 

 vessels. (P. 336.) 



This survival without distress at heights which, for condors, 

 reaches 7000 meters, results from two causes, according to M. 

 Campana: let us examine them with the care that his important 

 work deserves. These two causes are expressed in the following 

 formula: 



In mammals, mountain sickness, balloon sickness, is explained by 

 the impossibility of a thoracic expansion regularly continued and 

 sufficient, due to the weakness of the muscles which move the thorax; 



