Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/158

146 our veins till we would gladly part with our hereditary cuticle, custom obliges us to invest ourselves in double and threefold garments—air-tight if not water-proof, some of them—which intensify the effects of the atmospheric heat by the retained animal warmth of our own bodies, and confine, not perspiration, but the benefits of perspiration, to the small uncovered portion of our skin.

Our cities are atmospheric bake-ovens. They exclude the horizontal air-currents that sweep freely through the shady arcades of the forest, but they admit sunlight and retain their self-created heat, their dust, and their sudorific vapors. We have inherited, the antique passion for whitewashed houses and stone fences that reflect the sun's rays with a distressing glare, while we have abolished the intramural gardens and free public baths that alleviated the summer sufferings of the ancient Mediterranean cities; but our hyperborean diet is perhaps a still more prolific source of evil.

The experience of all tropical and sub-tropical nations has taught them to avoid animal food and fat, and to counteract the influence of a sultry climate by cooling, non-stimulating drinks and fruit, for a three or four years' neglect of these precautions is sure to undermine the soundest constitution, as demonstrated by the fate of countless employés of the East Indian administration, who left Great Britain as models of Saxon or Celtic vis virilis, and returned as tremulous invalids after a few hundred beefsteak-and-ale dinners in the atmosphere of the Lower Ganges Valley. The advent of our autumnal night frosts and bracing north winds saves most of us from the ultimate consequences of this East Indian malady, but not one man in a thousand escapes the pro tempore penalties of living through the tropical quarter of the solar year as if he were fighting the battle of life against an arctic snow-storm. Cold air is a tonic and antiseptic, and under its influence many substances which Nature never intended for our food become healthy or at least digestible, for a Kamtchatka fisherman can swallow as his daily ration a dose of blubber and brandy that would kill seven Hindoos. The pork-steaks and bitters that feed the fire of life in December smother it in August like so much incombustible rubbish, or evolve fumes that obscure its brightness, till we yearn for the equinoctial gale like a becalmed mariner in a fog, or take refuge from hypochondria in the summerless heights of a mountain-region; and, if starvation were not so often superadded to the cold and the darkness of the season of short days and long nights, it would be very doubtful if the bitterest winter sorrows of the children of Nature could compare with the self-inflicted summer martyrdom of a European or North American dyspeptic. For languor, dull headaches, nausea, and troubled dreams, though singly and momentarily no very serious evils, can aggregate in a sum of misery that has induced all northern nations to make a high temperature the chief characteristic of the pit of torment.