184 EFFECTS OF DEFICIENT VENTILATION. 



and bodily lassitude is felt, which is immediately 

 relieved by getting into the open air. 



I have seen churches frequented by upwards of a 

 thousand people, in which, in winter, not only no 

 means of ventilation are employed during service, 

 but even during the interval between the forenoon 

 and afternoon services, the windows are kept as 

 carefully closed as if deadly contagion lay outside, 

 watching for an opportunity to enter by the first open 

 chink, and where, consequently, the congregation 

 must inhale, for two or three hours in the afternoon, 

 an exceedingly corrupted air, and suffer the penalty 

 in headaches, colds, bilious and nervous attacks. 



Few of our schools are well regulated in this re- 

 spect. It is now several years since, on the occa- 

 sion of a visit to one of the classes of a great 

 public seminary, my attention was first strongly 

 attracted to the injury resulting to the mental and 

 bodily functions from the inhalation of impure air. 

 About 150 boys were assembled in one large room, 

 where they had been already confined nearly an 

 Iiour and a half when I entered. The windows 

 were partly open; but, notwithstanding this, the 

 change from the fresh atmosphere outside to the 

 close contaminated air within was obvious to every 

 sense, and most certainly was not without its effect 

 on the mind itself, accompanied as it was with a 

 sensation of fulness in the forehead, and slight head- 

 ache. The boys, with every motive to activity that 

 an excellent system and an enthusiastic teacher 

 could bestow, presented an aspect of weariness and 

 fatigue which the mental stimulus they were under 

 could not overcome, and which recalled forcibly 

 sensations long bygone, which I had experienced to 

 a woful extent, when seated on the benches of the 

 same school. 



These observations stirred up a train of reflec- 

 tions ; and when I called to mind the freshness and 

 alacrity with which, when at school, our morning 



