Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/254

242 This is a question which experience alone can decide. Doubtless the larger the area of screened opening, the more effective the filtration. For a book-case with glazed front, probably the whole of the back might be made of flannel loosely fixed over the necessary skeleton framework. For a cupboard or closet, every panel should be replaced by a screen. If the closet have a window, all crevices and joints in the window should be pasted up to exclude the soot, otherwise the wind from, the outside, or the fires of the house from the inside, will force the air soot through. On the other hand, it is probably true that, given very perfect fitting and workmanship, aided by the interposition of velvet, as hereafter described, where the edges of the doors come in contact with their frame, a much smaller area of filter, perhaps even a simple tube, filled with cotton-wool, may prove to be efficient. These, however, are points on which further experience is needed, and which may, ere long, be settled by experiment.

Where shall we place our screen? This is a question which admits of a variety of answers, and gives scope for endless ingenuity. In anything which is being newly made, such as the cupboards and closets of a new house, or in new furniture, we are masters of the situation. In many of them we may substitute at the back our filtering texture for wooden boards, and perhaps even save expense thereby. In closets we may replace the panels of the door by filtering texture, guarding the closets, if necessary, against thieves by wire netting or iron bars fixed on the inner side. As a rule, chests of drawers may have the filter over the whole surface at the back, care being taken that the back of each drawer falls half an inch short of the top of the drawer, to allow free entrance of air from the screen. In one set of drawers, so placed that I could not get at the back, the difficulty was got over in this way: In the front of each drawer a series of twenty holes, of an inch diameter, was made for admission of air. The filter, on a frame, was fixed on the inner surface of the front of the drawer, so that the material should stand half an inch away from the holes. A somewhat similar plan was adopted in a bureau. About twenty large holes, two inches in diameter, were cut in the wood-work at the back, some of the holes being opposite pigeonholes. Then the whole was covered with bunting, on a frame so arranged that the bunting was fully half or two thirds of an inch away from the wood. Another method has been adopted at the Yorkshire College for some of the cases. The filter was applied at the roof, somewhat after the fashion of a weaving-shed roof, the vertical face being filled in by the screen. Again, Mr. Branson has provided a roof filter for a case of scientific instruments, by placing the screen in the roof of the case, and protecting it by a false roof two inches above it, to prevent its being choked by falling dust.