CHAPTER XIII.

'Tis life, not death, for which we pant

'Tis breath whereof our nerves are scant,

More life, and fuller, then we want."-Tennyson.

Woman, stand erect! Woman, remove that corset and breathe! Panting is not breathing. Corsets are curses.

Remember that the exhausted impure air in your sittingroom is near the floor, and the warm and purer air above your heads, near the ceiling; therefore, to secure circulation and pure air, ventilate at the bottom by the mop-board. This will permit the carbonic acid and the various exhalations to escape. Rooms high and capacious are conducive to health; the heated air is near the ceiling. Low beds, however fashionable, are an abomination. More people die of air-tight apartments than from cheap, unchinked log cabins in new countries. Open the windows.

In building a mansion or fitting up a common house for the family, put down one or more open fireplaces as among the chief blessings. Make it generous and old-fashioned for the burning of wood. How healthy and how social, too, for the family group to sit around it in the long winter evenings! If open wood fires are impossible, then use open coal grates.

The old-fashioned fireplace, with crevices under the door and along the base-boards was healthy, because the gaseous impurities, oxides, decaying vegetable exhalations, and carbonic acid would pass off or be consumed with the fuel of the fireplace. Lowering the windows at the top to purify the air of a room is an exhibition of ignorance. It might let out some of the warm and purer air-that and nothing more!

Each individual requires full 2,000 gallons of pure air per day, weighing twenty-five pounds—requires three times as much by weight as he does of food and water combined.

The purest air, richest in oxygen and ozone, is found in forests and sun-kissed fields, and among the pines by the seaside, and up the sides of towering mountains.

During the Indian mutiny, 146 English prisoners were shut in an almost air-tight room, called afterwards "The Black Hole of Calcutta." Into this room, scarcely large enough to hold them, the air could enter only by two small windows, and at the end of eight hours only 23 of the unfortunates were alive.

After the battle at Austerlitz 300 Russian prisoners were confined in a very badly ventilated underground room, where, within a few hours, 260 of them smothered and perished.

During my voyage from Madras, India, where I had spent weeks visiting the leper hospitals, to Natal, South Africa, we were overtaken by a most terrific storm, and our stupid, halfintoxicated captain shut down the hatchways, and further fastened the cabin doors. He came near suffocating and murdering the whole of us.

Measure

The larger is not necessarily the stronger man. ments for armies and for the power of endurance show that the men best fitted for either are 5 feet 8 inches in height; weigh from 160 to 165 pounds; lift about 500 pounds, and breathe on the spirometer 340 to 360 cubic inches. The breathing should be intercostal; the inspirations deep and full.

Each year we perform 7,000,000 acts of breathing, inhaling over 1,000,000 cubic feet of air, and purifying over 3,500 tons of blood. This breathing should be deep and the air exhilarating -all afire with oxygen and ozone. This ozone, so much spoken of, is a more condensed and active form of oxygen. It abounds upon high mountains, and may be generated by suspending a roll of phosphorus by a wire in a jar of water.

Smoking lamp lights and stoves should be excluded from sick-rooms; and, further, the light not only consumes the oxygen that the patient needs, but it produces a tremulous motion in the atmosphere, preventing that quiet sleep and rest so indispensable to nervous and sensitive people.

Sleeping apartments should always be upon the south side

SNORING AN UNNECESSARY VICE.

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of a residence. They need the sun. Pots of flowers and rose bushes under bedroom windows are as interesting as healthful. The beautiful pepper-tree of Athens, the eucalyptus of Australia, and the trailing evergreens of our own country, as well as hopvines, sage beds, and the various aromatic mints ward off malaria, develop ozone in the atmosphere, and conduce to health in our homes.

The reason that Indians and the Arabs of the desert seldom or never have headaches, dyspepsia, rheumatism, or consumption is because they live mostly in the open air, and engage in a great deal of physical exercise. Outdoor exercise is healthful because people generally breathe deeper then, and, breathing deeper, they take more oxygen into their lungs, and as the oxygenated air breathed purifies the blood, the more deep outdoor breathing the purer and more vigorous the blood. "The blood," says the Bible, "is the life."

Most of the cheap talk about the dangers of the night air is as erroneous as absurb. Windows partly open or ajar should be the rule during the entire twenty-four hours, and this at all seasons. The night air is especially beneficial in cities and populous towns, because more free from dust, from smoke, and from street excrementitious exhalations.

Hunters, herders on the plains, and soldiers upon battlefields, though sleeping in open tents or upon beds of green boughs, seldom take cold. If living in a malarial district, shut the windows at sundown and build a little fire in the fireplace.

In coming out of a warm church or crowded lecture room, put a handkerchief or muffler over the mouth and breathe through the nostrils. Such breathing tempers and modifies the atmosphere.

Snoring is a disagreeable and unnecessary vice. It may be avoided by breathing through the nostrils and keeping the mouth shut. Many people would do well to keep their mouths shut more than they do. Great talkers are rarely deep thinkers. It was long ago proven by the shepherds of Syria that large numbers of domestic animals did not thrive well when living

and sleeping together; and it is both indelicate and unhealthy for several persons to sleep in the same room. The evils of rebreathing the same air cannot be too severely condemned, and for the reason that we take back into our bodies that which has just been exhaled.

Cold air may be just as impure as warm air. Some one-idea people insist in sleeping in a cold room, just as though there was some virtue in a room intensely cold. A sleeping room should be of an agreeable temperature, large, and well aired.

Attorneys pent up in small, ill-ventilated offices, where country clients spit tobacco-juice; clerks, merchants, and ministers of the gospel-all who necessarily follow sedentary habits of life, should go off frequently among the mountains, climbing to their very summits. They should exercise in the gymnasium, ride spirited steeds, take early morning walks, and drink in the rising sunbeams.

If feeble and nervous, keep away from the humid savannas of the South: if inclined to consumption, better in most cases go to Newfoundland than to New Orleans or Florida.

The cooler and clearer the outdoor air is the better it is, generally speaking, for breathing, because more condensedpacked, as it were, more solid. In two cubic inches of air, equally pure, one at the equator and the other at the poles, the one at the poles has a much larger amount of oxygen-the great life-giver and purifier of the blood.

STANFORD LIBRAN

CHAPTER XIV.

"TIRED nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep."—Young.

"O sleep, it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole." -Coleridge.

"Now blessings light on him that first invented sleep! It covers a man all over, thought and all, like a cloak. It is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot."-Cervantes.

The constitutionally lazy are great sleepers. The bed is their fetish. Oysters exist, repose, rest. Thinkers, live, act, and stand with gold the tempers of the ages. Normal sleep is a necessity.

The tremulous needle, poised upon a pivot, points to the north. The earth is a magnet, and so is the human body. Those who have read Reichenbach's "Researches in Magnetism" do not doubt this. If these are facts, people should sleep with their heads to the north, especially those living in England. The magnetic needle, however, does not point north in all countries. Sailors know this by the variations of the needle, and scientists frequently speak of its "declination." "Over the whole of Asia," says R. A. Proctor, in his "Science for Leisure Hours," "the needle points almost due north; while in the north of Greenland and of Baffin's Bay the magnetic needle points due west." So Greenlanders should sleep with their heads to the west; while Americans and Asiatics of the Orient should sleep with heads due north-sleep in harmony with the moving of the magnetic currents. "But" says some stern, flint-headed peasant, "I can sleep any way; I feel no difference." Quite likely;