AIR.—The wear and tear in our bodies is replaced by new material carried to the spot by the blood. The heart forces the blood out along the arteries in a bright red current. It comes back blackened with the refuse material. It passes to the lungs, where it comes into contact with the air we breathe. It does not quite touch the air, but is acted upon by the air through very thin partitions much as the cash business is carried on in some houses and banks with the cashiers all placed behind screens, where they may be seen and talked to but not reached. Purified in the lungs by contact with fresh air, the blood goes back to continue the good work of making the body sound. But if the air has been used before by someone in breathing it has become bad and the blood does not get the benefit from contact with it in the lungs that nature intended. Ordinarily a man breathes in about four thousand gallons of air in a day if he is taking things easily, but when he is hard at mental or physical work he needs much more than this. Air that has been hurt by being breathed is restored to the right condition by the leaves of trees and plants. In large cities where people are crowded together there is a lack of good air. But nature is continually rushing the air about so that new may take the place of what has been used, rain washes it out, and the storm brings in from the country just the kind of air the city man needs in his lungs.
BIRD LIFE IN INDIA.
IN INDIA bird-life abounds everywhere absolutely unmolested, and the birds are as tame as the fowls in a poultry yard. Ring-doves, minas, hoopoes, jays and parrots hardly trouble themselves to hop out of the way of the heavy bull-carts, and every wayside pond and lake is alive with ducks, geese, pelicans, and flamingoes and waders of every size and sort, from dainty beauties, the size of pigeons, up to the great unwieldy cranes and adjutants, five feet high.
IRELAND'S LOST GLORY.
THERE is perhaps no feature of Irish scenery more characteristic and depressing than the almost universal absence of those tracts of woods which in other countries soften the outlines of hills and valleys. The traveler gazing on its bald mountains and treeless glens can hardly believe that Ireland was at one time covered from shore to shore with magnificent forests. One of the ancient names of the country was "The Isle of Woods" and so numerous are its place-names derived from the growth of woods, shrubs, groves, oaks, etc., that (as Dr. Joyce says) "if a wood were now to spring up in every place bearing a name of this kind the country would become clothed with an almost uninterrupted succession of forests." On the tops of the barest hills and buried in the deepest bogs are to be found the roots, stems and other remains of these ancient woods, mostly of oak and pine, some of the bogs being literally full of stems, the splinters of which burn like matches.