624 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION I. 
Secrion I.—PHYSIOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SecTION.—LeEonaRD Huu, M.B., F.R.S. 
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5. 
The President delivered the following Address :— 
Lasr year the distinguished President of this Section raised us to the contem- 
plation of the workings of the soul. I ask you to accompany me in the con- 
sideration of nothing higher than a stuffy room. Everyone thinks that he 
suffers in an ill-ventilated room owing to some change in the chemical quality 
of the air, be it want of oxygen, or excess of carbon dioxide, the addition of 
some exhaled organic poison, or the destruction of some subtle property by 
passage of the air over steam-coils, or other heating or conducting apparatus. 
We hear of ‘devitalised’ or ‘dead’ air, and of ‘tinned’ or ‘potted’ air of the 
battleship. The good effects of open-air treatment, sea and mountain air, are 
no less generally ascribed to the chemical purity of the air. In reality the 
health-giving properties are those of temperature, light, movement, and relative 
moisture of the surrounding atmosphere, and leaving on one side those gross 
chemical impurities which arise in mines and in some manufacturing processes, 
and the question of bacterial infection, the alterations in chemical composition 
of the air in buildings where people crowd together and suffer from the effects 
of ill-ventilation have nothing to do with the causation of these effects. 
Satisfied with the maintenance of a specious standard of chemical purity, the 
public has acquiesced in the elevation of sky-scrapers and the sinking of cavernous 
places of business. Many have thus become cave-dwellers, confined for most of 
their waking and sleeping hours in windless places, artificially lit, monotonously 
warmed. The sun is cut off by the shadow of tall buildings and by smoke—the 
sun, the energiser of the world, the giver of all things which bring joy to the 
heart of man, the fitting object of worship of our forefathers. 
The ventilating and heating engineer hitherto has followed a great illusion in 
thinking that the main objects to be attained in our dwellings and places of 
business are chemical purity of the air and a uniform draughtless summer tem- 
perature. 
Life is the reaction of the living substance to the ceaseless play of the 
environment. Biotic energy arises from the transformation of those other 
forms of energy—heat, light, sound, &c.—which beat upon the transformer—the 
living substance (B. Moore). Thus, when all the avenues of sense are closed, the 
central nervous system is no longer aroused and consciousness lapses. A boy, 
paralysed in almost all his avenues of sense, fell asleep whenever his remaining 
eye was closed. The patient who lost one labyrinth by disease and, to escape 
unendurable vertigo, had the other removed by operation, was quite unable to 
guide his movements or realise his position in the dark. Rising from bed one 
night, he collapsed on the floor and remained there helpless till succour arrived, 
