Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/18

8 camping-gear for the Alleghany highlands, and arrange for their return by the end of October. Patrons of a transatlantic passenger line had better go a month sooner, to avoid the midsummer nightmares of a superheated cabin. European tourists can combine the useful with the agreeable by doing their sight-seeing afoot; but they should remember that Alpine morning breezes can not always neutralize the bedroom air of a South-German tavern, and that sultry heat aggravates the effects of mal-ventilation. The German, Austrian, and Russian shepherds stay the whole summer with their flocks, but, as a class, are nevertheless remarkably subject to pulmonary diseases, and for the following reason: They pass the night in a Schäfer-hütte, a sort of ambulance-box, eight feet by four, and six feet high, without windows, but with a tight-fitting sliding-door. This door the ill advised proprietor shuts after dark, and breathes all night the azotized air of his Black Hole of Calcutta on wheels. In the morning he awakens with a hacking cough, superadded to a profuse perspiration and a feeling of nausea. The air of the mountain meadows gradually relieves the other symptoms, but not the cough, which finally becomes chronic; and, with exquisite facilities for the attainment of a patriarchal longevity, the slave of the night-air superstition dies in the forenoon of his life.

combined with a tubercular diathesis, hastens the macerative (or "hectic") stage of the disease. Air is gaseous food, and the body of an ill-fed man who stints his lungs in life-air is thus suffering under a compound system of starvation. Hence the occasional rapidity in the development of tubercular consumption, and its frightful ravages in the homes of the poor, and in the stuffy tenements of French dress-makers and Silesian weavers, where a perpetual air famine aggravates the want of bread.

Fat is the best lung-food, and, among all fat-containing substances, fresh, is about the best, and salt pork the worst. There is a close correlation between consumption and the various scrofulous affections; "pulmonary scrofula" is, indeed, sometimes used as a synonym of tuberculosis. The French physiologist Villemin found