THE FAVORITE POISON OF AMERICA. 



205 



breathed, having, by passing through the lungs, 

 been deprived of most of the healthful gas, is 

 little less than unmixed poison (nitrogen.) 



Now, a room, warmed by an open fire-place 

 or grate, is necessarily more or less ventilated, 

 by the very process of combustion going on ; 

 because, as a good deal of the air of the room 

 goes up the chimney, besides the smoke and 

 vapor of the fire, a corresponding amount of 

 fresh air comes in at the windows and door 

 crevices to supply its place. The room, in 

 other words, is tolerably well supplied with 

 fresh air for breathing. 



But let us take the case of a room heated 

 by a close stove. The chimney is stopped up, 

 to begin with. The room is shut up. The 

 windows are made pretty tight to keep out 

 the cold ; and as there is very little air car- 

 ried out of the room by the stove-pipe, (the 

 stove is perhaps on the air-tight principle, — 

 that is, it refjuires the minimum amount of 

 air,) there is little fresh air coming in through 

 the crevices to supjjly any vacuum. Suppose 

 the room holds 300 hogsheads of air. If a 

 single person recjuires 57 hogsheads of fresh 

 air per day, it would last four persons but about 

 twenty-four hours, and the stove would re- 

 quire half as much more. But, as a man 

 renders noxious as much again air as he expires 

 from his lungs, it actually happens that in four 

 or five hours all the air in this room has been 

 either breathed over, or is so mixed with the 

 impure air which has been breathed over, that 

 it is all thoroughly poisoned, and unfit for 

 healthful respiration. A person with his 

 senses unblunted, has only to go into an ordi- 

 nary unventilated room, heated by a stove, 

 to perceive at once, by the effect on the 

 lungs, how dead, stifled, and destitute of all 

 elasticity the air is. 



And this is the air which four-fifths of our 

 countrymen and countrywomen breathe in 

 their homes, — not from necessity, but from 

 choice ' 



This is the air which those who travel by 

 hundreds of thousands in our railroad cars, 

 closed up in winter, and heated with close 

 stoves, breathe for hours — or often entire 

 days.* 



This is the air which fills the cabins of 

 closely packed steamboats, always heated by 

 large stoves, and only half ventilated ; the air 

 breathed by countless numbers — both waking 

 or sleeping. 



This is the air — no, this is even salubrious 

 compared with the air — that is breathed by 

 hundreds and thousands in almost all our 

 crowded lecture-rooms, concert-rooms, public 

 halls, and private assemblies, all over the 

 country. They are nearly all heated by 

 stoves or furnaces, with very imperfect venti- 

 lation, or no ventilation at all. 



Is it too much to call it the national poi- 

 son, this continual atmosphere of close stoves, 

 which, whether travelling or at home, we 

 Americans arc content to breathe, as if it 

 were the air of Paradise ? 



We very well know that we have a great 

 many readers who abominate stoves, and 

 whose houses are warmed and ventilated in 

 an excellent manner. But they constitute no 

 appreciable fraction of the vast portion of our 

 countrymen who love stoves — fill their houses 

 with them — are ignorant of their evils, and 

 think ventilation and fresh air physiological 

 chimeras, which may be left to the speculations 

 of doctors and learned men. 



And so every other face that one meets in 

 America, has a ghostly paleness about it, that 

 would make a European stare. t 



What is to be done ? " Americans will have 



* "Why the iiiarenuity of clever Yankees has not been di- 

 rected to warmiiiij railroad cars (by means of steam conveye«l 

 throug^h metal tulies, running under tlie floor, and connected 

 with flexible coupling pipes.) we cannot well understand. It 

 would be at once cheaper than the present mode, (since waste 

 steam could be used,) and far more wholesome. Railroad 

 cars have, it is true, ventilators at the top for the escape of 

 foul air, but no apertures in the floor for the inlet of fresh 

 air! It is like emptying a barrel without a vent. 



t We ought not, perhaps, to include the Germans and Rus- 

 sians. They also love .stoves, and the poison of bad air indoors, 

 and therefore have not the look of health of other European na- 

 tions, though they live far more in the open air llian wc do. 



