294 WISCONSIN STATE AORIOULTUBAL SOCIETY. 
enlightenment, witnessed the wholesale slaughter of prisoners in 
the Black Hole at Calcutta, by foul air, in 1756, because the au¬ 
thorities were ignorant of the laws governing ventilation. Among 
the common people there came to be a stupid horror of fresh air 
and the professional classes were too besotted by prejudice to lift 
their patients out of the mire. 
NECESSITY FOR VENTILATION. 
Human life demands fresh air, which must be in some degree 
pure. Eight parts of carbonic acid, to ten thousand parts of atmos¬ 
phere, has been named as the maximum of impurity that can be 
endured without injurious consequences supervening. Unfortu¬ 
nately inmost of our public buildings, schools among the rest, the 
proportion commonly obtained is live times as great as that indi¬ 
cated by science as the ultimatum. The body has a wonderful cap¬ 
acity to adapt itself to surrounding circumstances. When the 
lungs fail to purify the blood, the liver comes to the rescue and is 
proportionally overworked. The foetus supported directly from the 
circulating system of its mother and having no action of the lungs 
to cleanse the vital current, develops a corresponding proportion of 
the other organ, which, at the time of birth, is always largely in 
excess of the post-natal requirements of the system. With food of 
another class less prepared to sustain life, the breathing apparatus 
comes into operation and the liver generally decreases in relative size. 
In latter life the two systems of purification supplement each other, 
on the same principle, hence minor impurities can be endured 
without immediately poisonous results. Children fall sick in over¬ 
crowded school-rooms and nausea relieves the stomach from food 
which the want of sufficient oxygen and the presence of animal im¬ 
purities in the air, combined with carbonic acid, has rendered 
noxious to life. Such incidents are too common to procure from 
the average observer such attention as they deserve. 
It is not too strong an expression when we assert that millions 
of human lives have been, and are being sacrified for want of care 
as to this primal necessity of our being, ventilation. 
The president of our State Medical Association, Dr. J. B. Whit¬ 
ing, in the last annual address to that’society says, with much force: 
Our children are crowded into school rooms that have little or no 
ventilation except as the heat of summer admits of opening doors 
