Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/497

Rh, it is almost utterly disregarded. The necessity of breathing is recognized, and we have various formulated sayings implying that to stop breathing is to stop living. But, practically, the world is trying to see how little air can be actually used—and, with some, this is almost their only economy and next, to see how poor a quality of air can sustain their life.

One-half of the civilized race—i. e., all the women, and some men—so dress themselves that by no possibility can they take a full breath. As the lungs are never fully inflated, their capability of expansion is gradually lessened. The result is, a contraction and diminution in the size of the chest, a want of roundness and fulness, and both men and women are "flat-chested," round-shouldered, and "sunken in." The eye will recognize this, and measurement will add certainty to judgment.

Take the men of New York to-day, and not one in five hundred can make a difference in the dimensions of the chest, from a full inspiration to a complete expiration, of five inches, measured at the nipple. Nor will the majority show an expansive capacity of even three inches. With the women it is still less; probably never since extreme childhood—for romping days end early now—have they been capable of taking a full breath in the daytime, the nearest approach to it being effected, not by the expansion of the chest, but by the action of the abdominal muscles and the downward withdrawal of the diaphragm.

Nor is this stated as a matter of simple curiosity; it has a practical and most important bearing on the subject under consideration. Supposing that the blood is sufficiently aerated without the use of the full capacity of the lungs, say by an increased number of respirations—are not the necessities of Nature thus adequately supplied, and consequently no injury done?

By no means, as every housewife's experience will abundantly illustrate. In the quiet and secluded angles and nooks gather the lint and dust of the whole apartment. In the corners and recesses of a hospital-ward gather the miasm and the pestilence. In the unused portions of machinery do we find the rust and tarnish, and the mildew blasts the quiet and the still parts of all Nature. In the same way, in those portions of the lungs, every minute extremity and division of which is a reticulated network of fibres, and vessels, and tubes, through which, at every expiration and subsequent inspiration, there should be an unceasing ebb and flow, with new elements constantly adding, and effete material perpetually renovating, yet, by reason of mechanical impossibility, there gather the results of this stagnation, the crassness of the blood, and those discordant elements which, had they not been allowed to accumulate in these undusted retreats, would have continued in the circuit of the blood, till they had arrived, in due course, at some of the great glandular strainers and purifying alembics