sleeping-rooms, the bedclothes should be strewn loosely around away from the bed, and the windows be opened, much or little according to the outside temperature, the doors leading to the rest of the house being closed during the airing of the apartments. Bedrooms and bedclothing should thus be aired every day for not less than half an hour.

Unless the region is malarious, outside air should be freely but judiciously admitted through the night into sleeping-apartments. If the outside temperature is low, an opening that will keep the air of the room well renovated need be only half the size of that employed when the temperature of the outside air is twice as high. The direction and strength of the wind, too, are to be considered. If it is blowing directly toward the windows, it will change the air of the room much more than a calm would do it, or than a wind blowing in any other direction; it will change it, in fact, proportionately to the velocity as well as the coolness of the wind.

A very unjust prejudice exists against night air. The very same person who praises the earliest morning air and decries the air of night forgets that they are the same. Night air is perfectly wholesome in a healthy country. If you should ever have the opportunity of living in a tent properly constructed, with board floor laid on scantling, and with a protective fly, you will find that you never before knew the delight of pure existence. Do not, however, commit the folly suggested a few months ago by some inexperienced person, who recommended ladies to go to some place in the wilds for the summer, and there, as he phrased it, "plunge into the woods," by camping out. In the first place, a healthy camp is never pitched in the woods, but near them; and secondly, for people unaccustomed to such a life, nothing could be more arduous. We say, as one who has had pleasant experience in camp, and seen woful experience of others, that to enjoy camp life it is necessary to

have hewers of wood and drawers of water. To serve as these, and additionally, as cooks, is work, real hard work. It is absurd to suppose that life in camp does not entail household work, and ladies who plunge into the woods with the opposite impression will be very glad to plunge out of them.

One of the best of sanitary appliances for a room in the winter, and especially for the sick-room, is an open fire-place for burning wood. There is always a column of air flowing languidly up the chimney when the fire, temporarily unneeded, has been allowed to go out, and flowing rapidly up it when the fire is burning. Thus the room, supposing that it does not receive its chief supplies of air from neighboring tenanted apartments, is always kept in the most sanitary condition without the slightest perceptible draught. Even in the summer-time, the up-draught in the chimney is admirable for changing, purifying, and deodorizing the air in the apartment.

In heating houses by furnaces in the cellar there is no necessity of drawing your supply of air for the air-chamber of the furnace directly from the outside, if only your cellar is perfectly dry and sweet. In fact, if the cellar is, as it should be, in a perfectly sanitary condition, some air from the cellar should be utilized in the furnace air-chamber, even if you have a fresh-air conduit leading to it from the outside of the building; for the cellar, as well as other portions of a dwelling, needs its scouring out by a constant flow of pure air through it.

Much illness results from cellars kept in an unsanitary condition. Do not let a decayed fruit or vegetable or a piece of spoiled meat remain there for a minute. Inspect it regularly to make sure that domestics in your house do not violate some hygienic rule. We knew a case once where disease broke out in a house, and it was discovered that the domestics had been using one of the coal-bins as a receptacle for slops. If the condition of the cellar is perfect, it is for the best in the general ventilation

of a house, that the air should be drawn directly from the cellar, and indirectly from the outside, because the air in the cellar is thus constantly changed and remains purer than it can possibly be in any other part of the house. Remember, however, that when this plan is adopted there should be an ample opening in one of the cellar-windows, not less than that afforded by the taking out of a whole pane of glass, to allow of free access to the furnace air-chamber of the air from the outside of the house. Otherwise, air from rooms contiguous to the cellar, and in most houses from the kitchen, will be drawn down into the air-chamber to supply it with air as a substitute for that which is inadequately struggling to reach it through the cracks around the cellar-windows.

Would that we could influence the buyers and renters of moderate, small, and the slenderest means to compel builders to introduce on the house-tops of our large cities of this part of the country shaded places for family and friendly summer gatherings. Philadelphia is in most respects the city of cities. for comforts, but the summer heats are not of these. Every one does not escape to Europe, the mountains, or the sea-shore. The majority must remain at home through long spells of exhausting heat. It is for such as these, as we have already tried indirectly to impress upon the general public, through an article contributed last winter to the Medical Register, that the sanitary effects and solace of pleasant house-tops are needed. From their use, the decrease in the summer mortality, especially among children, would be amazing to most persons, and the added boon that they would confer, during the heated term, on the life of stifling alleys and courts would be incalculable.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

A

THE CIRCULATION AND DIGESTION.

WORK of this sort, in which so much has been said as to

the bodily functions, should not omit some general mention of the special functions of the circulation of the blood and the digestion of food. Accordingly, before proceeding to our concluding chapters on miscellaneous matters, cosmetic articles, household recipes, etc., we give a brief description of these processes.

The popular notion of respiration is that it is represented only by an alternate expansion and contraction of the chest, corresponding to the inspiration and expiration of air. But, respiration being fundamentally the consumption of oxygen and the liberation of carbonic-acid gas and aqueous vapor, it takes place in other ways. The gills of the fish absorb the oxygen present in water and liberate carbonic-acid gas. The human skin aids the lungs to some degree by respiration. The unborn child, as we have already incidentally mentioned, respires entirely by means of the placenta of the mother,—a temporary organ of vascular character, which, known as the after-birth, follows the course which the latter name indicates.

Between birth and death the human organism breathes, as is well known, by means of the lungs, save, as has been indicated, to a certain extent by the skin. The vital functions of digestion and circulation, of which respiration is a part, proceed as follows: The food taken into the stomach forms a pulp, which has absorbed saliva and other fluids as the food finds its way to the more potent digestive fluids of the stomach proper. This pulp, known as chyme, is, then, a mass of food that has gone through some chemical change representing partial digestion; the process