190 EFFECTS OF DEFICIENT VENTILATION. 



may labour for fifteen or twenty years without hav- 

 ing been a month confined by disease during all that 

 time, and which are therefore said to be healthy 

 trades ; and yet, when the investigation is pursued 

 a little farther, it is found that the general health 

 is so steadily, although imperceptibly, encroached 

 upon, that scarcely a single workman survives his 

 fortieth or fiftieth year. 



It is this insidious influence of impure air to 

 which I am anxious to direct attention. So long as 

 delicacy is the rule, and robust health the exception, 

 especially among females, and so long as fifty or 

 sixty thousand persons perish annually in Great 

 Britain from consumption alone, it will be difficult 

 to persuade any rational and instructed mind that 

 every cause of disease is already removed, and that 

 further care is superfluous. My own conviction, on 

 the contrary, is, that by proper care, and a stricter 

 observance of the laws of the animal economy on 

 the part of the parents and guardians of the young, 

 the development of the disease might be prevented 

 in a large proportion of the number, and that even 

 the robust would enjoy health in a higher degree, 

 and with increased security. It is an instructive 

 proof of this, that those who have directed their 

 chief attention to training either man or animals for 

 athletic exercises, or the race-course, have been led, 

 by observation, to attach the utmost importance to 

 pure air. Sir John Sinclair has been at pains to 

 collect the rules followed by Jackson, the celebrated 

 trainer, and others of the same profession ; and he 

 tells us that, by all of them, the necessity of pure 

 air is uniformly insisted upon. Sir John adds, that 

 the same condition was deemed so essential by the 

 ancients, that the Roman Athletae established their 

 principal schools at Capua and Ravenna, as the 

 most pure and healthy air of all Italy ; and that, in 

 fi)e training of race-horses, and even of game-cocks, 



