Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/597

Rh "Beware of the night-wind; be sure and close your windows after dark"! In other words, beware of God's free air; be sure and infect your lungs with the stagnant, azotized, and offensive atmosphere of your bedroom. In other words, beware of the rock spring; stick to sewerage. Is night-air injurious? Is there a single tenable pretext for such an idea? Since the day of creation that air has been breathed with impunity by millions of different animals—tender, delicate creatures, some of them—fawns, lambs, and young birds. The moist night-air of the tropical forests is breathed with impunity by our next relatives, the anthropoid apes—the same apes that soon perish with consumption in the close though generally well-warmed atmosphere of our northern menageries. Thousands of soldiers, hunters, and lumbermen sleep every night in tents and open sheds without the least injurious consequences; men in the last stage of consumption have recovered by adopting a semi-savage mode of life, and camping out-doors in all but the stormiest nights. Is it the draught you fear, or the contrast of temperature? Blacksmiths and railroad-conductors seem to thrive under such influences. Draught? Have you never seen boys skating in the teeth of a snow-storm at the rate of fifteen miles an hour? "They counteract the effect of the cold air by vigorous exercise." Is there no other way of keeping warm? Does the north wind damage the fine lady sitting motionless in her sleigh, or the pilot and helmsman of a storm-tossed vessel? It can not be the inclemency of the open air, for, even in sweltering summer nights, the sweet south wind, blessed by all creatures that draw the breath of life, brings no relief to the victim of aërophobia. There is no doubt that families who have freed themselves from the curse of that superstition can live out and out healthier in the heart of a great city than its slaves on the airiest highland of the southern Apennines.

In such countries as Italy and Mexico, where the plurality of the population pass the daylight hours in open air, unventilated bedrooms are almost the only cause of tubercular diseases; but in the north, where children have to be nursed like exotic birds, the chief defects of our domestic arrangements may be classed under three heads: impure air, want of sunshine, and want of room for exercise. The beau-idéal of a healthy house would be a well-plastered stone building on some eminence, remote from swamps and stagnant creeks, but surrounded by sunny slopes available for play-grounds; spring or well water; out-door cellar, kitchen in an out-house, or at least not directly below the sitting and sleeping rooms; high ceilings, wainscots, or wall-paper of innocuous colors; deep windows, with projecting mullions to admit the air and exclude the rain; an airy veranda, and no shade-trees on the east and west side, as sunlight is most needed in the mornings and evenings. Children can not thrive in dark back rooms, and in the first eight years of their lives should have all the exercise they want. The countrymen of Dr. Fröbel are ahead in this respect, and the