The Favorite Poison of America [pp. 411-415]

THE LADIES' REPOSITOR r.
that, as a matter beyond dispute, he requires
aboutfifty-seven hogsheads of air in twenty-four
hours.
Besides this, it is equally well settled, that as
coimm-on air consists of a mixture of two gases,
one healthy-oxygen-and the other unhealthynitrogen-the air we have once breathed, having, by passing through the lungs, been deprived
of most of the healthful gas, is little less than
unmixed poison-nitrogen.
Now, a room, warmed by an open fireplace or
grate, is necessarily more or less ventilated, by
the very process of combustion going on; because, as a good deal of the air of the room goes
up the chimney, besides the smoke and vapor
of the fire, a corresponding amount of fresh air
comes in at the windows and door crevices to
supply its place. The room, in other words, is
tolerably well supplied with fresh air for breathing.
But let us take the case of a room heated by
a close stove. The chimney is stopped up, to
begin with. The room is shut up. The windows are made pretty tight to keep out the cold;
and as there is very little air carried out of the
room by the stove-pipe-the stove is perhaps on
the air-tight principle, as it requires the minimum amount of air-there is little fresh air
coming in through the crevices to supply any
vacuum. Suppose the room holds three hundred hogsheads of air. If a single person requires fifty-seven hlogsheads of fresh air per
day, it would last four persons but about twentyfour hours, and the stove would require half as
much more. But, as a man renders noxious as
much again air as hlie expires from his lungs, it
actually happens that in four or five hours all
the air in this room has been either breathed
over, or is so mixed with the impure air which
has been breathed over, that it is all thoroughly
poisoned, and unfit for healtvful respiration.
A person with his senses unblunted has only to
go into an ordinary unventilated room, heated
by a stove, to perceive at once, by the effect on
the lungs, how dead, stifled, and destitute of all
elasticity the air is.
And this is the air which four-fifths of our
countrymen and countrywomen breathe in their
homes-not from necessity, but from choice!
This is the air which those who travel by
hundreds of thousands in our railroad cars,
closed up in Winter, and heated with close
stoves, breathe for hours-or often entire days.
This is the air which fills the cabins of closely
packed steamboats, always heated by large
stoves, and only half ventilated; the air breathed
by countless numbers-both waking or sleeping.
This is the air-no, this is even salubrious
compared with the air-that is breathed by
hundreds and thousands in almost all our
crowded lecture-rooms, concert-rooimhs, public
halls, and private assemblies, all over the coun try. They are nearly all heated by stoves or
furnaces, with very imperfect ventilation, or no
ventilation at all.
Is it too much to call it the national poison,
this continual atmosphere of close stoves, which,
whether traveling or at home, we Americans
are content to breathe, as if it were the air of
paradise?
We very well know that we have a great many
readers who abominate stoves, and whose
houses are warmed and ventilated in an excellent manner. But they constitute no appreciable fraction of the vast portion of our countrymen who love stoves-fill their houses with
them-are ignorant of their evils, and think
ventilation and fresh air physiological chimeras,
which may be left to the speculations of doctors
and learned men.
And so every other face that one meets in
America, has a ghostly paleness about it, that
would make a European stare.
What is to be done? "Americans will have
stoves." They suit the country, especially the
new country: they are cheap, labor-saving, clean.
If the more enlighltened and better informed
throw them aside, the great bulk of the people
will not. Stoves are, we are told, in short, essentially democratic and national.
We answer, let us ventilat.e our rooms, and
learn to live more in the open air. If our countrymen will take poison in, with every breath
which they include in their houses and all their
public gatherings, let them dilute it largely, and
they may escape from a part at least of the evils
of taking it in such strong doses.
We have not space here to show in detail the
best modes of ventilating now in use. But they
may be found described in several works, especially devoted to the subject, published lately.
In our volume on "Country Houses," we have
briefly shown, not only the principles of warming rooms, but the most simple and complete
modes of ventilation-from Arnot's chlimneyvalve, which may for a small cost be easily
placed in the chimney flue of any room, to Emerson's more complete apparatus, by which the
largest apartments, of every room in the largest
house, may be warmed and ventilated at the
same time, in the most complete and satisfactory manner.
We assure our readers that we are the more
in earnest upon this subject, because they are so
apathetic. As they would shake a man about
falling into that state of delighted numbness
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