CLIMATE SANITARY RELATIONS. 471 



great vitalizer, the great creator and destroyer of organisms ; 

 of light, the incomputable, the illimitable power, " offspring 

 of heaven, first-born," and electricity, his brother, rather 

 himself again, dread, wonderful agent, all of which belong 

 to the kingdom of the air, and are represented in the cli- 

 mates of places, and of which record has been made. The 

 relationship of purely mechanical or physical conditions of 

 the air, its rarity and density, and barometric vicissitudes ; 

 as also of its medical constitution, with sanative power or 

 seeds of death, are more or less pre-established by geo- 

 graphy, topography, and geology. The influence of surface, 

 of valley, mountain, gentle slope, or precipitous declivity, 

 sheltered or exposed situations, characters and composi- 

 tion of soils, with vegetable covering, as of trees, shrubs, 

 grass of savanna, or naked sands of the desert, winds or 

 calms thereon, with annual and diurnal thermometric and hy- 

 grometric changes, also their relationships to gastronomies, 

 aesthetics, including morals and religions, have all been cog- 

 nized and united, more or less accurately, with physiological 

 states and conditions, and their consequent pathological 

 and psychological infirmities. The connection of health and 

 disease with all these elements, the state and condition of 

 original diathesis of bodies subjected to them, of organs and 

 tissues submitted to them, of form or type of disease, style 

 and stage of development brought under their influence, 

 have, to a certain extent, been established. 



Other more recondite researches- have been made into the 

 existence and nature, or specific qualities of a certain principle 

 in the air, called ozone, discovered by Schonbein. It is said to 

 be an "irritant principle," a "powerful oyxdizer, at once de- 

 stroying those poisonous gases composed of hydrogen united 

 with sulphur and phosphorus, and the presence of which ren- 

 ders the air irrespirable. The various gaseous products of 

 the decomposition of animal and vegetable matters which are 

 being incessantly evolved, especially in great towns, seem, 

 according to the experiments of Schonbein, to yield no less 

 completely to the destructive influence of ozone. Hence it 



