OF SLEEPING ROOMS.

Next to our meat and drink, the subject of first importance is the sleeping room and its care. Bed rooms should be well lighted, have good air supply, be moderately well heated, and have painted walls. Never choose a room with a stationary washbowl in it if you can help it; the chances are strongly against your being able to keep the sewer air out of the room, and, in addition, there is a vile smell from the waste pipe itself. If a waste pipe, or even a pipe supplying clean water, be examined after a few months' use, it will be found that there is a considerable sediment deposited inside, and if it be a waste pipe this lining will be very thick. This lining or coating of adventitious material is a trap to catch germs and bacteria of all sorts, and germs of specific disease there find a suitable place for propagation. In the matter of ventilation, if the bed room is heated by an open grate, the

ventilation will be good whenever there is a fire. Closets for clothing should be ventilated thoroughly, and the clothing removed every week, the closet wall cleaned, and every twelve months calcimined. There is great danger in allowing a closet to open into a bed room unless these precautions be taken. The bath room and water-closet should, in no circumstances, be placed in the bed room. Do not be afraid of fresh air in sleeping rooms; and, unless the air is in summer blowing off a swamp or other malarious place, there is no danger from admitting plenty of fresh air, even at night. In cities, the air between one o'clock and six o'clock in the morning is the purest. Keep warm in bed by means of plenty of clothing, but allow the fresh air to enter. Nothing compensates for absence of oxygen. If a fire is burning in the grate the expansion of the air in the heated chimney will create a strong upward current, and, to prevent a vacuum, the air will rush into the

room at all its crevices to take the place of that extracted through the chimney flue; by this means the bed chamber may be kept well ventilated. without perceptible draught. This is the reason why the grate fire is in every way preferable to the abominable stoves that throw out gas enough to choke one, in addition to the exhaustion of the oxygen, without creating any compensating current. It is well to remember that in a cold chimney there is usually a downward current; which furnishes a reason for the uncanny custom a long-unused chimney has, of "smoking," when the fires are first lit in the autumn.

Finally, it may be stated that no sleeping room should have paper on its walls.

PLUMBING AND PLUMBERS.

The Malthusians looked upon war with approbation and viewed epidemics with complacency, for they considered them to be wise provisions of an overruling Providence by which overincrease in the population of the earth was measurably checked; but there is reason to believe that the later followers of Malthus placed the efficiency of the old-fashioned plumber upon a much higher plane than either war or pestilence, for he not only slayed his thousands and tens of thousands, but he did it in each instance with the consent of the victim, who usually paid with alacrity for the privilege of having himself and his family poisoned with expedition and positive certainty. Of all the buildings erected in this city up to a very recent period, there were few without serious defects in drainage, which may be plainly seen by anyone who is neither an architect nor plumber. One of the most serious

of these defects was the practice of laying the main waste-pipe directly under the basement floor, in the long axis of the building. The rule should be to carry each waste and soil pipe separately out of the building at the nearest possible point of exit.

The invention of the plumber would not be an unmixed evil were plumbers everywhere required by law to register and to pass a practical examination before such registration. Any plumber of a few months' experience may wipe" a joint with great facility, and be thereby considered an able workman, but few of the old plumbers knew anything whatever of the properties of sewer-gas, the law of its diffusion, or the first principles of hydraulics; on the contrary, the average plumber went on constructing his drains with right angles instead of curves, put in traps without ventilation, and invariably laid the main drain with the greatest possible length under the cellar.