162 PHYSIOLOGY AND HEALTH. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



Connection between Fulness of Life and Respiration. Hybernating 

 Animals stupid. Man is lively or dull in Ratio of Respiration. 

 Consumptive Persons have less Energy of Life. Diminution of 

 Air and Respiration lowers Life. Lodgers in unventilated Cham- 

 bers unrefreshed in Morning. 



374. Nature has connected a fulness, buoyancy, and 

 energy of life with the amount of respiration. Reptiles, 

 snakes, frogs, have a small respiratory apparatus; they 

 breathe but little, and are dull, heavy, and inactive. They 

 have comparatively little muscular energy, and little nervous 

 power. As we ascend in the scale of animals, we find the 

 correspondence between the activity of their respiratory 

 functions and their general vital energy to be more and 

 more manifest. Birds have more life and muscular power 

 than other animals, and they have a fuller development of 

 their respiratory apparatus, and breathe a freer air. Man, 

 also, has a larger preparation for breathing, and more ener- 

 gy of nervous and of muscular life. 



375. The hybernating animals retire to holes and cav- 

 erns in winter; and there they spend the cold season in a 

 torpid, insensible, almost lifeless state. But, in the spring, 

 they come out with new life aryi activity. In the dormant 

 state, the hedgehog breathes only four or five times, and 

 the dormouse eight or nine times, a minute, and both with 

 so little motion as to be scarcely perceptible. While their 

 respiration is thus feeble, all their voluntary functions, their 

 power of motion, and their sensations, seem entirely sus- 

 pended, and their vital energies reduced to the lowest point 

 consistent with the bare continuance of life. 



376. But the warm weather of spring gives them a ne\v 

 life; then the lungs again expand, and work with their ac- 

 customed activity ; the blood circulates freely ; the old par- 

 ticles are taken away, and new ones supply their places, and 

 respiration carries otf the offensive matters, and the whole 



