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regarded as unfitted for respiration, and capable of inducing 

 narcotic poisoning and diminished vital action. 



Of all the volatile combinations of hydrogen in nature, 

 distinguished for their villainous smell, those with sulphur, 

 phosphorus, and ammonia are the most noisome. These are 

 the true products of animal putrescence and feculent dis- 

 charges. The privy drainage is fruitful of these compounds; 

 and although we find that the daily inhalation of diluted 

 draughts of these gases, when recently evolved, is compatible 

 with health to grooms, tanners, and others, whose occupation 

 is amongst them, yet every day's observation serves to con- 

 vince me that they are, under other circumstances, highly 

 inimical to animal life. Though not invariably and to all 

 alike equally pestiferous, they ordinarily exert a baneful 

 influence on the nervous centres, if they do not occasion 

 positive illness. I have knowij fourteen cases of fever 

 promptly induced in a court at Halifax, by the long deferred 

 removal of a single ash-pit cesspool. The experiments of 

 Halle, Chaussier, and Gay Lussac, all demonstrate the 

 poisonous influence of sulphuretted hydrogen when intro- 

 duced into the system, either by the access to the lungs, 

 cellular tissue, stomach, or the rectum. They found that 

 atmospheric air, when charged with the 150th part of this gas, 

 proved fatal in a very short time to a horse, one 800th to a 

 dog, and that in the proportion of one 1,500th it immediately 

 destroyed a small bird. Nine quarts of it introduced into 

 the intestine through the rectum of a horse, killed the animal 

 in one minute ; and when merely applied to the skin of a 

 rabbit, it died in ten. The hydro-sulphate of ammonia, 

 when undiluted, at once occasions asphyxia ; and one or 

 two well ascertained cases have occurred within the last six 

 months, in London and elsewhere, of death from this cause, 

 in which, I believe, the blood was found to be fluid, the 

 muscles flaccid, and the air cells of the lungs filled with 



