In my second lecture we considered the general principles governing the circulation of air, the courses of its movements, the manner of the action of heat upon different kinds of substances, which creates a constant, ceaseless motion of the air, in all places, from the minutest corked bottle to the vast currents that sweep over the face of the earth.
Now, having learned the necessity for pure, fresh air, and studied the general laws governing its circulation, let us apply these principles to every-day life. To every-day life? I should say every-hour life—nay, every moment of our lives; for twenty times every minute of our entire life, from the cradle to the grave, do we breathe what ought to be pure air. Is it always pure?
If we breathe one single breath, in the entire day, of impure air, it will weaken us, deduct from our capacity to attend to our daily duties, and shorten our lives, in exact mathematical proportion to the amount of impurity in that one single breath. Now, we breathe twenty times every minute, twelve hundred times every hour, twenty-eight thousand times every day, and nothing but absolute and perfectly pure air answers the exact requirements of perfect health.
Well, you may ask, at first thought, if fresh air is such a panacea for all evils, and there is such an abundance of it out of doors, why not breathe it, and always enjoy perfect health?
Think one moment. I eat my breakfast in the morning, generally refreshed by a night of good sound sleep, (for I sleep with my windows open.) Immediately after breakfast, I enter the cars to come to the city. What a smell comes from the car as the door is opened! and unless I wish to incur the displeasure, or provoke the indignation, of almost every passenger, by opening a window, I am obliged to sit in that foul, offensive atmosphere, and breathe the poisonous exhalations from my own lungs, and that from dozens of others, some of them, it may be, badly diseased, (most persons' lungs are diseased in this country, from breathing foul air, and many other diseases besides consumption are produced thereby.)
Thus, in one half hour, I have inhaled six hundred times of this foul and poisonous air, and the blood has carried it to every portion of my body, so that my entire system is completely saturated, poisoned, yes, thoroughly poisoned by it, from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet.
And thus is the day commenced. Your blood is thoroughly poisoned before your breakfast is digested; for your breakfast will no more digest without pure air than the coal in your stove will burn without it. You are subjected to headache, dyspepsia, and a half dozen other aches and pains, and are tired out long before night. And thus you are killed long before you would die if you breathed pure air only.
And am I relieved from the difficulty when I arrive in the city?
Start to-morrow morning at the Delaware River, on Arch or Walnut Streets, or any other street, and go to the Schuylkill. Inquire of every individual, in office, store, dwelling or factory, if he knows whether he had pure air to breathe all day, or whether he can tell you, with any degree of accuracy, how pure the air was in the room he occupied for any hour of that day.
I fully believe there is not one in ten—no, not one in a hundred—of the most intelligent men in that entire street, doctor, lawyer, architect, or any other, that can give you an accurate account of the condition of the air breathed during any one hour of the day. That is not all. There is scarcely one in a hundred that can satisfy you, by an intelligent description, of the means used for providing it: