Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/88

 even one brief half-hour's slumber and repose! How often the "business man," — he who breathes the atmosphere of money-bags, lives wholly on change, and whose sweetest melody is the music of jingling dollars; the man who reads with feverish anxiety the daily commercial news, and watches with deep interest the fluctuations of stocks and commodities in the half-glutted marts of the "civilized" world, as he bends in slavish worship at the shrine of the golden god, — how often, I repeat, do men like him — and they are very plentiful in these dismal days — go day after day, for months and years, with scarce a night's sound sleep! Thus it is plain that mankind can, and often does, support existence, when deprived of food, raiment, light, heat, exercise, water, sleep, and fresh air.

Atmospheric air is a compound, one-third of which is oxygen; and this oxygen contains the principle of animal life within the minute globules whereof it is formed. Now, if there be an excess of this life-principle in a given volume of oxygen, whoever breathes it burns up, as it were, and becomes unfitted for normal living. If in the air we breathe there be less than a due amount of oxygen, containing the vital principle, whoever breathes it slowly but surely dies. This discovery — that oxygen is more than a common gas; that it is the vehicle of the vital principle, hence is itself a principle — is a most important one to the world, and especially the scientific portion thereof. If oxygen were to be withdrawn from the air for one short five minutes, every living thing — man and plant, animal and insect, reptile and fish, bird and worm — would perish instantaneously, and the globe we inhabit be turned into one vast festering graveyard. Not a vestige of any kind of life would remain to gladden the vision of an angel, should one of God's messengers chance to wing his flight that way. All terrestrial things would have reached a crisis; creation's wheels and pinions be effectually clogged; life itself go out in never-ending darkness, and gaunt, dreary chaos ascend the throne of the mundane world, never again to be displaced!

The immense importance of this principle may be seen in the case of those who delve for lucre in the shape of coal, tin, etc., etc., hundreds of feet beneath earth's surface; for these people manage to live with a very limited supply of oxygen and the vital principle as inhalants, making amends for it by eating highly