The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking | Page 8

in jars to which no air can find entrance. With only
undiluted oxygen to breathe, the tissues would dry and shrivel, fuel
burn with a fury none could withstand, and every operation of nature be
conducted with such energy as soon to exhaust and destroy all power.
But "a mixture of the fiery oxygen and inert nitrogen gives us the
golden mean. The oxygen now quietly burns the fuel in our stoves, and
keeps us warm; combines with the oil in our lamps, and gives us light;
corrodes our bodies, and gives us strength; cleanses the air, and keeps it
fresh and invigorating; sweetens foul water, and makes it wholesome;
works all around us and within us a constant miracle, yet with such
delicacy and quietness, we never perceive or think of it, until we see it
with the eye of science."
Food and air are the two means by which bodies live. In the full-grown
man, whose weight will average about one hundred and fifty-four
pounds, one hundred and eleven pounds is oxygen drawn from the air
we breathe. Only when food has been dissolved in the stomach,
absorbed at last into the blood, and by means of circulation brought
into contact with the oxygen of the air taken into our lungs, can it begin
to really feed and nourish the body; so that the lungs may, after all, be
regarded as the true stomach, the other being not much more than the
food-receptacle.
Take these lungs, made up within of branching tubes, these in turn

formed by myriads of air-cells, and each air-cell owning its network of
minute cells called capillaries. To every air-cell is given a blood-vessel
bringing blood from the heart, which finds its way through every
capillary till it reaches another blood-vessel that carries it back to the
heart. It leaves the heart charged with carbonic acid and watery vapor.
It returns, if pure air has met it in the lung, with all corruption
destroyed, a dancing particle of life. But to be life, and not slow death,
thirty-three hogsheads of air must pass daily into the lungs, and
twenty-eight pounds of blood journey from heart to lungs and back
again three times in each hour. It rests wholly with ourselves, whether
this wonderful tide, ebbing and flowing with every breath, shall
exchange its poisonous and clogging carbonic acid and watery vapor
for life-giving oxygen, or retain it to weigh down and debilitate every
nerve in the body.
With every thought and feeling some actual particles of brain and nerve
are dissolved, and sent floating on this crimson current. With every
motion of a muscle, whether great or small, with every process that can
take place in the body, this ceaseless change of particles is going on.
Wherever oxygen finds admission, its union with carbon to form
carbonic acid, or with hydrogen to form water, produces heat. The
waste of the body is literally burned up by the oxygen; and it is this
burning which means the warmth of a living body, its absence giving
the stony cold of the dead. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" may well be the literal question for each day of our lives; and
"pure air" alone can secure genuine life. Breathing bad air reduces all
the processes of the body, lessens vitality; and thus, one in poor health
will suffer more from bad air than those who have become thoroughly
accustomed to it. If weakened vitality were the only result, it would not
be so serious a matter; but scrofula is soon fixed upon such
constitutions, beginning with its milder form as in consumption, but
ending in the absolute rottenness of bone and tissue. The invalid may
live in the healthiest climate, pass hours each day in the open air, and
yet undo or neutralize much of the good of this by sleeping in an
unventilated room at night. Diseased joints, horrible affections of the
eye or ear or skin, are inevitable. The greatest living authorities on
lung-diseases pronounce deficient ventilation the chief cause of

consumption, and more fatal _than all other causes put together_; and,
even where food and clothing are both unwholesome, free air has been
found able to counteract their effect.
In the country the balance ordained in nature has its compensating
power. The poisonous carbonic acid thrown off by lungs and body is
absorbed by vegetation whose food it is, and which in every waving
leaf or blade of grass returns to us the oxygen we demand. Shut in a
close room all day, or even in a tolerably ventilated one, there may be
no sense of closeness; but go to the open air for a moment, and, if the
nose has not been hopelessly ruined by want of education, it will