Now, we breathe into our lung-bellows whatever air happens to be around us. So we should take care that the air around us is fresh air.
Unless the air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn’t do at all for our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this clear, fresh air to breathe—“all outdoors,” in fact, as far as we can see around us and for miles above our heads. She sends the winds to move the air about and blow away the dust and dirt; and the sunshine, you remember, not only to warm the air and keep it moving, but to burn right through it and kill the poisons. But this brings us to something else.
You have learned that the air we breathe out would soon smother us, just as smoke would; and now we will see why. If you blow against the window pane on a cold day, the glass is no longer clear; and when you look at it closely, you see that it is covered with tiny drops of water. This is part of the breath you have just blown out. If the room is cold enough, you can see your breath in the air; that is, the steam in your breath becomes cold and appears as tiny water-drops. You have seen how in the same way, the steam, an inch or so from the spout of the teakettle, cools, making little water-drops that float in the air like clouds. Part of the breath, then, is water; but most of it is a gas, and you can’t see it at all as it floats away into the air about you.
If your teacher has a glass of limewater, and will let you breathe into it through a tube, you will see that your breath soon makes the water look milky. This shows that the gas in your breath is not like the air about you; because air was all over the top of the limewater, yet did not change it at all. The milky look is caused by carbon dioxid, one of the poisons in your breath.
When some people come close to you, you want to turn away your head, because you do not like the smell of their breath. Even when one is quite well, the breath has a queer “mousey” odor, so that we never like to breathe the breath of another person. This disagreeable odor comes not only from the lungs but from the teeth.
We are always breathing out poisons into the air. One of these you can see in the milky limewater, and others you can smell when you happen to come close to anyone else.
PROVING THAT THE BREATH IS NOT LIKE THE AIR
If you blow on your fingers, you feel that your breath is much warmer than the air. If people are crowded together in rooms with doors and windows shut, their breath soon heats and poisons the air, until they begin to have headache, and to feel dull and drowsy and uncomfortable. If they should be shut in too long, without any opening to let in the fresh air, as in a prison cell, or in the hold of a ship during a storm, the air would become so poisonous as to make them ill, and would even suffocate them and kill them outright. Even the bees found this out thousands of years ago; and in their hives in hot weather they station lines of worker-bees, one just behind another from the door right down each of the main passages, whose business it is to do nothing but keep their wings whirring rapidly, so that they fan a steady current of fresh air into every part of the hive.
