In our churches, the foul air left by the congregation on Sunday is shut up during the week, and heated for the next Lord's day, when the people assemble to rebreathe the polluted atmosphere. They are thus forced, with every breath they take, to violate the physical laws of Him whom they meet to worship,--laws written not three thousand years ago upon Mount Sinai on tables of stone, but to-day engraved in the constitution of their own living, breathing bodies. On brains benumbed and starving for oxygen, the purest truth and the highest eloquence fall with little force.
We sleep in a small bedroom from which every breath of fresh air is excluded, because we believe night air to be unhealthy, [Footnote: There is a singular prejudice against the night air. Yet, as Florence Nightingale aptly says, what other air can we breathe at night? We then have the choice between foul air within and pure air without. For, in large cities especially, the night air is far more wholesome than that of the daytime. To secure fresh air at night, we must open the windows of our bedroom.] and so we breathe its dozen hogsheads of air over and over again, and then wonder why we awaken in the morning so dull and unrefreshed! Return to our room after inhaling the fresh, morning air, and the fetid odor we meet on opening the door, is convincing proof how we have poisoned our lungs during the night.
Each room should be supplied with two thousand feet of fresh air per hour for every person it contains. Our ingenuity ought to find some way of doing this advantageously and pleasantly. A moiety of the care we devote to delicate articles of food, drink, and dress would abundantly meet this prime necessity of our bodies.
Open the windows a little at the top and the bottom. Put on plenty of clothing to keep warm by day and by night, and then let the inspiring oxygen come in as freely as God has given it. Pure air is the cheapest necessity and luxury of life. Let it not be the rarest!
SCHOOLROOM VENTILATION.--Who, on going from the open air of a clear, bracing winter's day, into a crowded schoolroom, late in the session, has not noticed the disagreeable odor, and been for a moment nauseated and half stifled by the oppressive atmosphere! It is not strange. See how many causes here combine to pollute the air. If the room is heated by a stove, quantities of carbonic-oxide and carbonic-acid gases, as well as other products of combustion, driven by downward drafts in the flue, escape through seams and cracks and the occasionally opened door of the stove. In the case of a furnace, the same effect is too often experienced, and the odor of coal gas is a common one, especially when the fire is replenished. The insensible perspiration is more active in children than in adults; they, moreover, rush in with their clothing saturated with the perspiration induced by their sports; so that, on the average, each pupil, during school hours, loads the air with about half a pint of aqueous vapor. The children come, oftentimes, from homes that are close, ill- ventilated, and uncleanly; and frequently from sick rooms, bringing in their clothing the germs of disease. (See p. 304.) Some of the pupils may even bear traces of illness, or have unsound organs, and so their breath and exhalations be poisonous.