CATCHING COLD. 187 



a person who has been in too close a room, or too 

 near the fire, gets cold and shivering, compared 

 with one who has been in a colder apartment, at a 

 greater distance from the fire, or in the open air. 

 Half the colds and coughs with which people are 

 annoyed in the winter are owing to their winter 

 habitations being too warm : and those complaints 

 are far more frequent in towns than in the open 

 places of the country. When people go hot into 

 the cold air, the evaporation from the surfaces of 

 their bodies is so rapid, as not only to make them 

 feel cold and shiver, but i f i t be long continued, to injure 

 the little follicles of the skin, which, in the healthy 

 states of the body, remove much of the waste mat- 

 ter that is unfit for the purposes of life ; and thus 

 that matter remains in the system, and acts as a 

 poison. Washing with warm water in cold weather 

 has much the same effect ; and they who resort to 

 that in order to avoid the temporary influence of the 

 cold, thereby subject themselves to it for the whole 

 day. In summer, warm water is a luxury, and a 

 wholesome, and almost immediately a cooling lux- 

 ury : but they who would escape chilblains and 

 frost-biting should avoid it in winter. 



The temporary warmth of the air, which melts 

 the hoar frost, acts in a similar manner. As the 

 spiculae of ice thaw (and very little heat thaws them, 

 as they are in small needles to which the air has 

 access on all sides), the water evaporates, and soon 

 takes as much heat from the atmosphere as cools 

 that more than ever ; and the cooling influence grad- 

 ually extends upward, till all the vapour in the sky, 

 up to a very considerable height, is much colder than 

 before. As the heat diminishes, the tendency of the 

 particles of water to each other, which has been 

 suspended, but not in the least destroyed by the heat, 

 returns to action, and the particles approach each 

 other, and form a cloud. That cloud gathers vapour 

 from all the space surrounding it, not only while it 



