53 



regard this air, so it be Warm, as quite clean enough 

 to breathe, simply because he cannot see the im- 

 purities in it.* Now what is the result of all this 

 disregard for the laws of life — laws made by that 

 inexorable Nature who permits not the slightest 

 infraction of any one of her decrees without exacting 

 a corresponding punishment? That every time our 

 friend sends his birds to a show he does so at the risk 

 of their coming back with either a bronchial catarrh 

 or perhaps an acute pneumonia, and when this 

 happens he blames the Show Committee and writes 

 letters to the paper after the true British fashion ! If 

 he sells a songster to an outsider it promptly goes on 

 the sick list unless it is immediately relegated to the 

 heated conservatory, and then he in his own turn is 

 blamed as a man in whom the truth is not. His 

 strain or variety comes to be regarded as shortlived 

 and delicate, and so the vicious circle is rounded up — 

 heat produces delicacy, delicacy requires heat. The 

 birds become more or less anaemic— that is to say 

 the blood becomes deficient in the number of red 

 corpuscles, the carriers of oxygen to the different 

 parts of the body — their hearts become functionally 

 diseased, and they become utterly unfitted to with- 

 stand either any sudden change of temperature or the 

 attacks of any microbe. In short, what should be 

 one of the hardiest of birds has now degenerated (in 

 this respect at least) into one of the frailest and most 

 weakly, and not even the most fancy of fancy varieties 

 need be that if managed on hygienic lines. 



* The following is a simple test for the presence of carbonic acid in the 

 air of a room. Fill a transparent medicine bottle (in the open air) with 

 ordinary clear lime-water. Cork it up and take it into the room to be experi- 

 mented on, and then while there pour away half the lime water and tightly 

 replace the cork. The bottle is now half-filled with the suspected air. On a 

 vigorous shaking of the bottle the carbonic acid in the contained air will 

 combine with the dissolved lime in the water, causing this latter to become 

 milky in appearance, and the more carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) there is 

 present the whiter the resultant will be. 



