94 THE HUMAN LUNGS. 



scented and tinted winds; and the tracing of the virtues of the 

 ground, through exhalation and aroma, property by property, into 

 the lungs and the circulating blood. For the physical man himself 

 is the builded aroma of the world. This, then, at least, is the 

 office of the lungs — to drink the atmosphere with the planet dis- 

 solved in it. And a physiological chemistry with no crucible but 

 brains must arise, and be pushed to the ends of the air, before we 

 can know what we take when we breathe, or what is the import of 

 change of air, and how each pair of lungs has a native air under 

 some one dome of the sky ; for these phrases are old and conse- 

 quently new truths. 



We notice, indeed, a great difference in the manner of the lungs 

 to the different seasons, for the genial times of the year cause the 

 lungs to open to an unwonted depth. The breaths that we draw in 

 the summer fields, rich with the sweets of verdure and bloom, are 

 deeper than those that we take perforce on our hard wintry walks. 

 Far more emotion animates the lungs at these pleasant tides. Nor 

 is this to be wondered at, any more than that we open more freely 

 at a table loaded with delicacies, than at a poorly furnished board. 

 The endowments of the vegetable kingdom in the atmosphere not 

 only feed us better with aerial food, but also keep us more open and 

 more deeply moved; and we shall see presently that the movement 

 of the lungs is the wheel on which the chariot of life runs, with 

 more or less intensity according as the revolution is great or small. 

 Now in summer it is great, and in winter it is small, for manifest 

 motives.* Furthermore, our noses themselves, the features of the 

 lungs, are in evidence that there is more to be met with per- 

 manently in the air than inodorous gases. For we cannot suppose 

 that scent ends organically where we fail to perceive it with the 

 sense. But enough has been said already on the flavorless world 

 and noseless doctrine of the chemists. 



* In a regular treatise on the chemistry of the lungs, the atmosphere would 

 be separately considered in its mineral, vegetable, animal and human constitu- 

 ents, and in the effects of these, as introduced through the lungs, upon the body 

 and the mind. In this work, however, we make no pretensions to treat the 

 subject according to this larger order, though other considerations following out 

 the above series will be presented in the sequel. 



