Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/498

484 of the system, where they would have been duly eliminated and discharged. These localities are the nuclei of disease, and here are deposited the tubercle and the germs of death.

This is the result of disuse—the farmer's neglected spot, the receptacle of odds and ends, never ploughed nor cared for, where weeds run riot, and whence every light-winged breeze wafts the myriad progeny of evil all over the adjoining fields.

How aggravated is this condition when the air, too, is deteriorated, full of miasm and pestilence! See the air of the swampy, undrained country, laden with agues and typhus, or the city atmosphere, shut in from sun and breeze, respired over and over again by the healthy and the sickly, by animals of every description, full of the dust of every production of the world, with the fumes of every volatile liquid and deleterious gas!

When we contrast this single vital element as it enters into the life of the modern man, compared with its free use by the men of the past, who are reported to have lived to a great age in health and comparative vigor, does there not seem to be almost reason enough for it in this fact alone?

The Greeks, like all Eastern nations, lived in the open air. The patriarchs of the Bible lived in tents. Even those of later date, who lived in the small cities of former days, occupied no tightly-glazed, windowed apartments, but slept a great part of the time on the unbedewed roofs of their houses, covered only by the radiance of the gentle moon and the twinkling stars.

In those days the heat came from the vigor of the system, and exercise at some useful employment, while wide-mouthed, gaping chimneys, consuming huge logs of timber, carried away, on their upward draught (with most of the heat indeed), the air wasted by respiration.

Nor was pure air a royal prerogative; for, down to quite recent times, these immense chimneys were the gates to health to our own ancestors, and we ourselves learned somewhat of our early astronomy by gazing at the stars through these huge telescopes, thickly hung around with the flitches of bacon and fat hams quietly absorbing the pyroligneous acids from the consuming logs of oak and walnut burning below.

Contrast those long winter nights in rooms through whose open cracks the wintry blast not unfrequently blew out the candle by whose dim light we groped our shivering way to bed; contrast them with the air we breathe, heated by the unceasing furnace, poisoned by everpresent tobacco-smoke, and at the best loaded with the impurities of a city, and passing on its course from house to house, constantly becoming more and more impure.

Sunlight.—This portion of the subject cannot be honestly left without some allusion to the marked influence which the sun has upon all Nature, both animate and inanimate. Hygienic writers have generally most astonishingly ignored the powerful effects of this luminary,