AMERICAN INSTITUTE. 231 



exclaim, involuntarily, can such a place exist in a city that has made any 

 progress in civilization. Even so long ago as in 1844, thirty-four thousand 

 of our population lived in alleys and courts, and seven thousand in cellars, 

 so constructed as to cut off all circulation of air, being dark, damp, and 

 chilly, the inmates suffering from the effects of rheumatism, fevers, conta- 

 gious and inflammatory diseases, affections of the skin, lungs, eyes, ears ; 

 degenerate in morals, degraded in habits. Fathers, mothers, children, 

 and strangers, sometimes to the number of thirty, crowded in a single 

 apartment of small dimensions. 



Half of these creatures die before the fifth year, the mean age of death does 

 not exceed twenty, and the remainder die under forty-five. Now, there 

 are limits to the denseness of population, which, when passed, invariably 

 lead to disease and death. To prevent this, pass a law to forbid crowding 

 of population, by adjusting, to superficial limits, the size and number of 

 dwellings, employ scavengers to remove solid bulky matters, construct 

 sewers and drains, with a sufiicient supply of water to carry to the receiv- 

 ing reservoirs, the comminuted solids, and adopt proper modes of ventila- 

 tion for a3rial matters, which latter subject is so little attended to, that 

 even the magnificent houses of our city, in which the wealthy and intelli- 

 gent reside, have no provision for a systematic mode of ventilation ; and 

 is this to be wondered at, when we know that there are whole Encyclopae- 

 dias of Architecture and Building, iu which the topic of ventilation, and 

 warming, even does not occur. I would recommend some capable Yankee 

 to give these matters attention, and publish a good book on the subject, 

 and thus spread general knowledge among the building community. And 

 let him bear in mind that a large part of the bulk of the human frame is 

 occupied with apparatus intended expressly for the purpose of ventilating 

 the blood, or exposing it to the action of pure atmospheric air ; this part is 

 the chest, which has to work incessantly, from the instant we enter the 

 world, until the moment we leave it. To shut up, therefore, four thousand 

 persons in the Academy of Music, nearly closed against the admission of 

 air, would render useless this extraordinary breathing apparatus, so admi- 

 rably formed by nature, as each individual would vitiate, in the course of 

 two hours, seventy-five cubic feet of atmospheric air, rendering it unfit for 

 the purposes of respiration. Therefore, the four thousand pair of lungs 

 will render three hundred thousand cubic feet of air noxious, causing them 

 to be prone to the attacks of each other's diseases, besides deteriorating 

 the general health. Even while the individuals who generate poison, not 

 by their respiration only, but by the poisonous emanations arising from 

 their bodies, may remain free from its effects themselves, still communi- 

 cate it to others, as was the case in the Black Assize, at Oxford, in 1577, 

 where the Lord Chief Baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred more, 

 (all who were present in the court,) were infected, by the prisoners, with 

 fatal typhus, and died in forty hours. The lungs afford a ready and ample 

 means by which effluvia may be conveyed into the circulating current, entail- 

 ing diseases which essentially depend on a vitiated state of blood, caused 



