Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/908

 740 The Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal. [June, bad. Presently a lady, seated near, tum- bled from her seat, and being unable, after removal from the house, so I sub- sequently learned from the newspapers, to give her name or address, she was taken to the public hospital, and suf- fered from serious illness. If the total neglect of ventilation renders the air so foul in the parquet, what must it be in the amphitheatre ? The case is still worse in the theatres and otber smaller places of public amusement. So far as the ar- rangements and decorations are con- cerned, the Concert-Haus is remarkably pleasing as a place of popular resort. On a recent occasion, arriving too late to obtain a seat on the floor, or in the first tier of loges, I had to go up to the second. There must have been over two thousand persons present, and a quarter of an hour after the conductor had made the first wave of his baton, the atmosphere became painfully op- pressive. I walked around three sides of the room, earnestly but vainly looking- for some crevice, where a breath of fresh air might be obtained. At last, knowing what I did of the general prejudice, (it must have been the very infatuation of despair) — I essayed to open the window ! There were two men standing near, with the perspir- tion gathered in beads upon their fore- heads When they realized my inten- tion, they regarded me with such looks as they might have cast upon a man in- sane, and indignantly asked whe her I did not know that a draft might result ? The first glorious strains of the Heroic Symphony were coming from an orches- tra of a hundred performers, and I might never have an opportunity of hearing it as well performed again, but this con- sideration could not remove my physi- cal misery, and I left the room. I shall not allude to the condition of a tightly closed coupe containing eight pas- sengers, on a cold winter night, nor to a dozen other cases which suggest themselves, in which no provision what- ever is made for comfort or health, so far as a supply of good air is concerned. In this -respect the little sleeping-cabi- net of the present king, at the palace of Potsdam, is as bad, and probably worse than that of many peasants. One ex- ample, in conclusion, will suffice. It is the lecture-room in the University building of Prof. Magnus, one of the most noted of living physicists. Some one hundred and fifty students are pack- ed together in a room twenty by thirty feet, around his apparatus-covered lec- ture-table. The lecturer is demonstra- ting with the nicest precision the laws which regulate the diffusion, osmose, and transpiration of gases, he certainly cannot be reproached with a lack of theoretical knowledge about these matters, which a recent critic in the Nation discovers in the author of a little book that has done untold good at home entitled " Man's own Breath his Greatest Enemy." But as he proceeds in his learned discourse, the window panes grow dim from condensed moisture. In a few moments after the class has assem- bled, the water is running down the glass in streams, it flows over the sill, until it reaches a gutter, which has been cut to receive it, and then pours down into large cups placed at the side. And this goes on, (the room being en- tirely closed,) for two hours. I am not describing an exceptional case; for, what is stated above is true, in a still greater degree, of other lecture-rooms in the University, and the arrangements which I have described are common to most houses I have seen. Keally, now that it is all written out, it looks as though I were trumping up a case against some Black Hole in Calcutta; or a count}' jail in the north of England. On the contrary I am speaking of a community which is perhaps without an equal in point of general intelligence and culture. It does amaze me that a people so far advanced in other respects should be so far behind hi all that re- lates to ventilation. A. R. Leeds, Berlin. Prof, of Chemistry.