February 22, 1873.] THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
677 
itself, instead of being, as is too often the case, mere 
fancy sketches. 
In conclusion, the labour of compiling so highly con¬ 
densed a treatise must have been very considerable, and 
probably the attempt to do too much is the principal 
reason why it has not been done better. If the author 
could be induced to rewrite it, and make it into five or 
.six volumes of the same size, there is no doubt that it 
might become a really valuable work. 
Health and Comfort in House Building. By J. 
Drysdale, M.D., and J. W. Hayward, M.D. Lon¬ 
don: E. & F. N. Spon. 1872. 
The system of ventilation set forth in this volume of 
114 pages is based upon the assumption that in our cli¬ 
mate no direct admittance of external air can be made 
"bearable for the major part of the year; that the fire¬ 
grates of our rooms can never act efficiently for both 
heating and ventilating the rooms, although some 
patterns, Galton’s for instance, come very close upon 
^effecting this; that no plans of ventilation for single 
rooms can supersede the necessity of one general plan 
for the whole house; that separate inlet and outlet 
•openings are indispensable; that the primary inlet of 
air should be arranged at one place only and be large 
enough to transmit a supply sufficient to meet the strain 
-of extra inmates (any excess of inflowing air in ordinary 
-times being reducible by valves) ; that the incoming air 
should be warmed—say in the basement of the central 
hall; that this central hall or corridor should form the 
reservoir of freshly warmed air, and that the doors of all 
the rooms, offices excluded, should open out of this ; that 
the fresh warm air out of this hall should be conducted 
into the rooms just below the cornice ; that the vitiated 
air should be led by outlets in the ceiling of every room 
into one foul air chamber situated above the ceiling of 
the uppermost room, and, in order to obtain a regular 
suction, by a downcast shaft down to below the kitchen 
.fireplace, and so up behind the fire there to a main up¬ 
cast shaft in the kitchen chimney. 
We will shortly describe a house in which this system 
is carried out. In a chamber below the staircase, con¬ 
taining coils of hot-water pipes—low pressure by the 
way—the fresh air is admitted, and one branch of these 
pipes leads round the skirting of the saloon out of which 
the reception rooms open, whilst another heats the con¬ 
servatory and passage. The warming apparatus is a 
boiler heated by coke or gas, and the fresh air for com- 
.bustion is supplied direct from the external atmosphere. 
The saloon is in this case made the chief reservoir of 
fresh warm air, and partly from this and from the stair¬ 
case the air is admitted into the rooms, either by open¬ 
ings near the cornices, as in the case of the living rooms, 
or through gratings formed in the architrave lintels as 
in the case of the bedrooms. 
The foul air is led from behind the ceiling ornament 
through a zinc tube between the joists into a foul air 
•chamber, constructed of zinc, of about six feet diameter 
by five feet high, made thoroughly air tight, and into 
this chamber each room leads by a separate tube. The 
chamber which collects the foul air communicates in a 
duplicate manner with the bottom of the exhaust shaft 
in the kitchen chimney, and the vitiated air finds an exit 
below the coping of the chimney. The section of this 
exhaust shaft resembles the now stereotyped circular 
flue inside a square one, the corners outside the circle 
forming the foul air shaft, and obtaining its heat from 
the smoke flue inside. 
One might naturally ask how the freshly warmed air 
in the hall, the saloon, or the passage which forms the 
chief reservoir is to be kept sweet and free from con¬ 
tamination, and so made equal in purity to the air which 
in an ordinary house is admitted by the open doors or 
^windows, louvres or air-bricks. This is effected by 
placing the inlet where the air is purest, close to the 
basement walls. Or, it is done by leading down the 
fresh air from the level of the top of the house as likeliest 
to be least loaded with dust and blacks. Query, how 
would this work when the house drain and the soil pipes 
were all ventilated to the top of the house ? A proper 
condition of atmosphere in the hall is also obtained by 
leading into the foul air flues and so on to the foul air 
chamber and down the siphon and eventually up the 
kitchen flue, all the products of gas combustion, all 
tobacco fumes, water-closet effluvia and so on. The 
servants’ rooms especially are shut off from ordinary 
connection with the best rooms, and what is equally im¬ 
portant the kitchen smells are withdrawn from their 
neighbourhood. 
We admit that here is an almost perfect system of 
ventilation, and there can be no doubt that if it were 
carefully carried out the whole house could be re¬ 
plenished with even more fresh air than the conventional 
three times every hour. It is not attempted to necessarily 
warm the house by means of heated air, on the contrary, 
open fire places are recommended to be constructed in 
the corners of the rooms, and the incoming air heated 
only to about 65°, or sufficient to suit the requirements of 
ventilation. It is not a scheme which comes before 
one laboriously set to the tune of “ Buy a broom 
which shall sweep all other ideas clean away.” It 
is rather an auxiliary system, and does not even dis¬ 
dain the assistance of the now common ventilating 
globe lights, which are so constructed as to remove 
the carbonic acid, etc., generated around the burner 
on through separate tubes into its own foul air flues. 
If it suggest a fault, it is because the condition 
of pure comfort and perfect healthfulness is depen¬ 
dent, especially in winter, upon the direct superintendence 
of the owner, or the supervision of, alas! the servants, 
according as the varying weather, the wind, or the at¬ 
mospheric pressure makes such attention necessary. 
Some one must govern the warming apparatus in propor¬ 
tion to the coldness, attend to the valves which regulate 
the current according to the number of indwellers, know 
how to occasionally isolate rooms, and how to divert the 
bulk of the fresh warmed air into certain other rooms 
occasionally—as, for instance, into bedrooms during a 
severe winter. But despite all this, there is no doubt 
whatever that, if the size of the primary air inlet in the 
outer wall be properly calculated, the area of the down¬ 
cast shaft from the foul air chamber carefully computed, 
and the withdrawing capacity of the ultimate upcast 
shaft accurately arrived at,—a house built upon this 
principle can be made very comfortable, indeed. And 
without doubt a house constructed with inlet and outlet 
shafts in this way, if not realizing spontaneous or auto¬ 
matic ventilation, might soon come to be understood by 
a responsible servant, and the sliding of the air bricks, 
which adjusted the inflowing and outflowing of the air 
fairly averaged by him or her. And we may .here say 
that the application of this plan of ventilation is not ne¬ 
cessarily confined to houses or blocks of houses, but can 
be made suitable for offices, churches, and other large 
buildings. In the latter cases, the chimney from the 
heating apparatus would have to contain the suction 
shaft. Besides, too, a special fire here all the year round, 
the upcast shaft might require the rarefaction yielded by 
a few gosburners. 
AVe have entered into the plan of Messrs. Drysdale 
and Hayward at some length, for it deserves a fair expla¬ 
nation at our hands, holding as we do. that hygiene is 
more a branch of medicine than of architecture, strictly 
so called. Whether architects will take kindly to the 
plan evolved will be due entirely to the amount of 
pressure put upon them by the building proprietors. An 
architect is very much like a merchant tailor, who will 
fashion a piece of cloth either into a cloak or a paletot 
just as he is instructed. Some there are who will not be 
influenced by extraneous pressure, and it would be only 
