686 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
Or if it be worthy the attention of scientific students, it is the students of psy- 
chology and biology, not of geology and hydroscopy and the science of ore 
deposits, who can profitably consider it. For us miners and prospectors the 
advice holds good which was given us 300 years ago by the wise Agricola, the 
father of our profession, who says the believers in the rod find some veins with 
it by accident. " But the same people much more frequently lose their pains, 
and in order to discover veins have to fatigue themselves with digging, not the 
less than the miners of the opposite school." 
MEDICINE AND HYGIENE. 
STOVE AND FURNACE HEAT. 
DR. A. N. BELL. 
So much has been said recently about the germ origin of disease, that people 
generally are in danger of having their attention diverted from prevalent tangi- 
ble causes of diseases within easy control, while catching at shadows. First 
among the controllable causes of ill-health in temperate and cold climates is an 
excessively variable or foul indoor atmosphere, due to defects in the mode of 
warming houses. Exposure to a temperature much below that of animal heat 
for any considerable time always weakens vitality and increases the susceptibility 
to disease. Hence, the economy of heat is a primary element in the art of pre- 
serving health. Of the common means to this end — clothing, houses, and fire — 
the last only is the subject of this article, and with special reference to the rela- 
tive merits, from the sanitary point of view, of stoves and furnaces as compared 
with steam. Simply to obtain the necessary degree of temperature would be an 
easy matter, but ventilation must be constantly kept in view, and this cannot be 
secured without some sacrifice of heat. Time was when the open flre-place was 
regarded as the conditio sine qua non of health ; but, as Rumford put it, "while 
the draughts chill one part of the body, the rest is roasted by the fire in the fire- 
place, and this cannot but be injurious to health." 
A close stove, everybody knows, is simply a hollow cylinder, or box, made 
of metal, brick, or earthenware, which is heated by a fire within it, and gives out 
its heat to the air by contact, and to surrounding solid objects by radiation. In 
an economical point of view it excels all other means of warming. The heated 
air from a fire-place is available to the apartment for only about twelve per cent 
of the total amount of heat produced : all the rest passes up the chimney. The 
close stove, on the contrary, utilizes from eighty-five to ninety per cent of the 
heat produced, and loses through the smoke-pipe only about as much as the open 
fire-place saves — ten to fifteen per cent. And herein lies the striking differ- 
ence between the relative healthiness of the atmosphere heated by a close stove 
