Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/624

606 of air lingers longer, until warmed enough to set off on its errand of ventilation and warming. Variations of heat in the stove quicken or retard the unconfined and full current rather than vary the heat of each particle, and we claim to accomplish by a self-acting process a fair uniformity of temperature.

It will, no doubt, be urged that a house kept up to 50° and 55° makes people "delicate;" that they "catch cold" when they go out; that a hardening process is healthy, and so on.

Our reply is, that a uniform temperature of 50° and 55° is natural and healthy. That the maintenance of this temperature in winter must be a question of clothes or fuel on the one hand, or of depressed functional action on the other. That the loving care which prescribes a cold bedroom and a hot, sweltering bed is of the nature of that kindness that kills. That children buried in blankets realize Prince Bismarck's coarse threat to the Parisians: that their delicate skins become overheated and relaxed while they are irritated by perspiration; at the same time that the most delicate tissues of all, in the lungs, are dealing with air abnormally frigid. Fevered or relaxed, the poor little victims of combined ignorance and kindness toss and dream, troubled under a mass of bedclothes, while the well-meaning mother, "wrapped in her virtue," and soothed by a bedroom-fire, slumbers peacefully through the working out of the sad process of "the survival of the fittest."

The only other objection to be urged against the use of a stove is the small part that the combustion of the fuel in it plays in the matter of ventilation. As the ventilation by means of an open-air fireplace is the principal cause of the waste of heat up the chimney, we cannot consider this gain from arrested waste as an objection, except in extreme cases of stove-misplacement. As, in the plan we are considering, the stove is the agent to supply a very large quantity of air, the plea that it does not abstract any large volume, we take to be an advantage, not an evil. The open fires become the chief diffusers, drawing the injected air within and then out of each room. We concede their employment to the claims of luxury as wasteful adjuncts, but minister still to comfort and luxury. At the same time we legitimatize their action and leave them free to work. We are no long-er at enmity with Nature; no longer spoiled children of civilization, struggling against "what is good for us;" but, freely accepting the imposed conditions of an artificial life, we use reason and common-sense to make them the best of their kind. We cook our air as we cook our food. Both in a raw state are objectionable. Both subjected to the modifying influence of heat become pleasant ministers to our daily wants. One generates the blood which is the life, the other is its purifier and renovator. The use of both is health, vigor, and enjoyment; the abuse of either counts up largely in the account we have to pay for what of evil there is in the world.—Abridged from Westminster Review.