FEESH AIE. 13 
and other places of public amusement are terribly exposed to 
atmospheric contamination. 
Our courts of law have been perhaps less cared for than any 
other public buildings. This is almost unaccountable, when 
it is considered that they are constantly occupied by the mem- 
bers of an intelligent profession, whose health and life are in 
a great measure dependent on the freedom from impurity 
of the atmosphere of these places. One would be inclined 
to recommend, in these cases, Government interference, seeing 
that justice itself may not be unlikely to miscarry when a 
judge has to sum up or pronounce a sentence with his blood 
poisoned with the fumes of carbonic acid. 
If we turn now to our places of business, our workshops 
and our factories, we shall find the same crowding and the same 
lighting and injurious effects much more permanent. In many of 
our factories, children and girls are crowded together, and little 
or no provision is made for ventilation. It is among the workers 
in these rooms that the forms of scrofula and the deadly con- 
sumption of the lungs are known to spread desolation. Many 
of our factories and workshops are well ventilated, but the 
majority are not. No law has yet been passed that will touch 
them. The workshops not only exist in our manufacturing 
districts, but in London and all our great towns. Where 
sedentary trades are carried on, there workmen and work- 
women are collected together, almost in every case, in rooms 
too small, and without provision for ventilation. An examina- 
tion of the returns of the mortality of any district in which 
there are sedentary workers will show how fearfully they 
suffer from consumption as compared with other classes of 
the community. There are, no doubt, other agencies at 
work ; but eliminate these, and the great source of the deaths 
from consumption will be found in the presence of carbonic acid 
in the atmosphere. 
Another class of rooms where ventilation is frequently 
neglected, to the prejudice of the health of the temporary 
occupants, are schoolrooms. The benefit found to accrue 
from discharging children every hour for a few minutes does 
not act more beneficially on their minds than it does on their 
bodies. The few minutes out of doors gives the children an 
opportunity to get fresh air, and to the judicious schoolmaster 
an opportunity of thoroughly ventilating the room. 
But perhaps our dangers are as great at home as anywhere. 
The sitting-room of the tradesman, the common room of the 
mechanic, the drawing-room of the wealthy, and the sleeping- 
rooms of all, are not ventilated. Many of them are not 
deficient in the means of ventilation ; but, as a rule, the home 
of the Englishman is poisoned by the gas exhaled from his 
