I50 



NATURE 



[October 3, 1912 



and by alcohol, or by indulgence in food, e.g., sweets, 

 which are everywhere to his hand, and by the nervous 

 excitement of business and amusement. He works, 

 he cats, and is amused in warm, windless atmospheres, 

 and suffers from a feeble circulation, a shallow respira- 

 lion, a disordered digestion, and a slow rate of 

 metabolism. 



Many of the employments of modern days are de- 

 test.ible in their long- hours of confinement and 

 monotony. Men go up and down in a lift all day, 

 and girls in the bloom of youth are set down in tobacco 

 rlalls in underground stations, and their health and 

 beauty there fade while even the blow-flies are free 

 to bask in the sun. In factories the operatives feed 

 machines, or reproduce the same small piece of an 

 article day after day. There is no art, or change ; 

 no pleasure in contrivance and accomplishment. The 

 miner, the fisherman, even the sewer-man, face difi"'- 

 culties, changing risks, and are developed as men of 

 character and strength. Contrast the sailor with the 

 steward on a steamer, the drayman outside with the 

 clerk inside who checks the goods delivered at some 

 city office, the butcher and the tailor, the seamstress 

 and the market woman, and one sees the enormous 

 difference which a confined occupation makes. 

 Monotonous sedentary employment makes for un- 

 happiness because the inherited functional needs of the 

 human body are neglected, and education — when the 

 outside field of interest is narrowed — intensifies the 

 sensitivity to the bodily conditions. The sensations 

 arising within the body — proprioceptive sensations — 

 come to have too large a share in consciousness in 

 comparison with exteroceptive. In place of considering 

 the lilies how they grow, or musing on the beauty and 

 motions of the heavenly bodies, the sedentary worker 

 in the smoke-befouled atmosphere, with the limited 

 activity and horizon of an office and a disturbed diges- 

 tion, tends to become confined to the inward considera- 

 tion of his own viscera and their motions. 



Many of the educated daughters of the well-to-do are 

 no less confined at home; they are the flotsam and 

 jetsam cast up from the tide in which all others 

 struggle for existence— their lives are no less 

 monotonous than the sweated sempstress or clerk. 

 They become filled with "vapours" and some seek 

 excitement not at the cannon's mouth but in breaking 

 windows, playing with fire, and hunger strikes. The 

 dull monotony of idle social functions, shopping and 

 amusement no less than that of sedentary work and 

 an asexual life, impels to a simulated struggle — a 

 theatrical performance, the parts of which are studied 

 from the historical romances of revolution. Each 

 man, woman, and child in the world must find the 

 wherewithal for living, food, raiment, warmth, and 

 housing, or must die or get some other to find it for 

 him. It seems to me as if the world is conducted as 

 if ten men were on an island — a microcosm — and five 

 sought for the necessaries of life, hunted for food, 

 built shelters and fires, made clothes of skins, while 

 the other five strung necklaces of shells, made loin- 

 cloths of butterfly wings, gambled with knuckle-bones, 

 drew comic pictures in the sand, or carved out of clay 

 frightening demons, and so beguiled from the first 

 five the larger share of their wealth. In this land of 

 factories, while the many are confined to mean streets 

 and wretched houses, possessing no sufficiency of baths 

 and clean clothing, and are ill-fed, they work all day 

 long, not to fashion for themselves better houses and 

 clothing, but to make those unnecessaries such as 

 "the fluff" of women's apparel, and a thousand trifles 

 which relievo the monotony of the idle and bemuse 

 their own minds. 



The discovery of radium and its disintegration as 

 a source of energy has enabled the physicist to extend 

 Lord Kelvin's estimate of the world's age from some 

 NO. 2240, VOL. 90] 



thirty to a thousand million years. .Arthur Keith does 

 not hesitate to give a million of these years to man's 

 evolution. Karl Pearson speaks of hundreds of thou- 

 sands of years. The form of the human skull, the 

 brain capacity of man, his skill as evidenced by ston? 

 implements and cave drawings of animals in action, 

 was the same tens of thousands of years ago as now. 

 For ages primitive man lived as a wild animal in 

 tropical climes, discovered how to make fire, clothe 

 himself in skins, build shelters, and so enable himself 

 to wander over the temperate and arctic zones. 

 Finally, in the last few score of years, he has made 

 houses draughtless with glass windows, fitted them with 

 stoves and radiators, and every kind of device to protect 

 himself from cold, while he occupies himself in the 

 sedentary pursuits and amusements of a city life. How 

 much better, to those who know the boundless horizon 

 of life, to be a frontiersman and enjoy the struggle, 

 with body hardened, perfectly fit, attuned to nature, 

 than to be a cashier condemned to the occupation of 

 a sunless, windless pay-box. The city child, however, 

 nurtured and educated in confinement, knows not the 

 largeness and wonders of Nature, is used to the streets 

 with their ceaseless movement and romantic play of 

 artificial light after dark, and does not need the com- 

 miseration of the country mouse any more than the 

 beetle who lives in the dark and animated burrows of 

 his heap. But while outdoor work disciplines the 

 body of the countryman into health, the town man 

 needs the conscious attention and acquired educated 

 control of his life to give him any full measure of 

 health and happiness. 



E.xperimental evidence is strongly in favour of my 

 argument that the chemical purity of the air is of no 

 importance. Analyses show that the oxygen in the 

 worst-ventilated school-room, chapel, or theatre is never 

 lessened by more than i per cent, of an atmosphere; 

 the ventilation through chink and cranny, chimney, 

 door, and window, and the porous brick wall, suffices 

 to prevent a greater diminution. So long as there is 

 present a partial pressure of oxygen sufficient to 

 change the haemoglobin of the venous blood into oxy- 

 hasmoglobin there can arise no lack of oxygen. 



At sea-level the pressure of oxygen in the pulmonary 

 alveolar air is about loo mm. Hg. Exposed to only 

 half this pressure the ha^moglobin is more than 80 per 

 cent, saturated with oxygen. 



In noted health-resorts of the Swiss mountains the 

 barometer stands at such a height that the concentra- 

 tion of oxygen is far less than in the more ventilated 

 room. On the high plateau of the .Andes there are 

 great cities : Potosi with a hundred thousand in- 

 habitants is .at 4,165 metres, ar.d the partial pressure 

 of oxygen there is about 13 per cent, of an atmosphere 

 in place of 71 per cent, at sea-level; railways and 

 mines have been worked up to altitudes of 14,000 to 

 15,000 feet. -At Potosi girls dance half the night, and 

 toreadors display their skill in the ring. On the slopes 

 of the Himalayas shepherds take their flocks to 

 altitudes of 18,000 feet. No disturbance is felt by the 

 inhabitants or those who reach these great altitudes 

 slowly and by easy stages. The only disability to a 

 normal man is diminished power for severe exertion, 

 but a greater risk arises from want of oxygen to cases 

 of heart disease, pneumonia, and in chloroform anass- 

 thesia at these high altitudes. The newcomer who is 

 carried by the railway in a few hours to the top of 

 Pike's Peak or the .Andes may suffer severely from 

 mountain sickness, especially on exertion, and the 

 cause of this is want of oxygen. Acclimalisation is 

 brought about in a few days' time. The pulmonary 

 ventilation increases, the bronchial tubes dilate, tl' ■ 

 circulation becomes more rapid. The increased pul- 

 monary ventilation lowers the partial pressure of carbnn 

 dioxide in the blood and pulmonary air, and this con- 



