Philosophers tell us that the breath of man is poisonous; that when collected in a jar it will kill mice, but when accumulated in a room it will kill men. Of this there are a thousand and one tales. I decline alluding to the Black Hole of Calcutta, but will take a specimen dug up by some sanitary gardener from Horace Walpole's letters. In 1742 a set of jolly Dogberries, virtuous in their cups, resolved that every woman out after dark ought to be locked up in the round-house. They captured twenty-six unfortunates, and shut them in with doors and windows fastened. The prisoners exhausted breath in screaming. One poor girl said she was worth eighteenpence, and cried that she would give it gladly for a cup of water. Dogberry was deaf. In the morning four were [pg 615] brought out dead, two dying, and twelve in a dangerous condition. This is an argument in favor of the new police. I don't believe in ventilation; and will undertake here, in a few paragraphs, to prove it nonsense.

At the very outset, let us take the ventilation-mongers on their own ground. People of this class are always referring us to nature. Very well, we will be natural. Do you believe, sir, that the words of that dear lady, when she said she loved you everlastingly, were poisonous air rendered sonorous by the action of a larynx, tongue, teeth, palate, and lips? No, indeed; ladies, at any rate, although they claim a double share of what the cherubs want—and, possibly, these humps, now three times spoken of, are the concealed and missing portions of the cherubim torn from them by the fair sex in some ancient struggle. There, now, I am again shipwrecked on the wondrous mountains. I was about to say, that ladies, who, in some things, surpass the cherubs, equal them in others; like them, are vocal with ethereal tones; their breath is “the sweet south, stealing across a bed of violets,” and that's not poisonous, I fancy. Well, I believe the chemists have, as yet, not detected any difference between a man's breath, and a woman's; therefore, neither of them can be hurtful. But let us grant the whole position. Breath is poisonous, but nature made it so; nature intended it to be so. Nature made man a social animal, and, therefore, designed that many breaths should be commingled. Why do you, lovers of the natural, object to that arrangement?

Now let us glance at the means adopted to get rid of this our breath, this breath of which our words are made, libeled as poisonous. Ventilation is of two kinds, mechanical and physical. I will say something about each.

Mechanical ventilation is that which machinery produces. One of the first recorded ventilators of this kind, was not much more extravagant in its charges upon house-room, than some of which we hear in 1850. In 1663, H. Schmitz published the scheme of a great fanner, which, descending through the ceiling, moved to and fro pendulum-wise, within a mighty slit. The movement of the fanner was established by a piece of clockwork more simple than compact: it occupied a complete chamber overhead, and was set in noisy motion by a heavy weight. The weight ran slowly down, pulling its rope until it reached the parlor floor; so that a gentleman incautiously falling asleep under it after his dinner, might awake to find himself a pancake. Since that time we have had no lack of ingenuity at work on forcing pumps, and sucking-pumps, and screws. The screws are admirable, on account of the unusually startling nature, now and then, of their results. Not long ago, a couple of fine screws were adapted to a public building; one was to take air out, the other was to turn air in. The first screw, unexpectedly perverse, wheeled its air inward; so did the second, but instead of directing its draught upward, it blew down with a great gust of contempt upon the horrified experimentalist. There is something of a screw principle in those queer little wheels fastened occasionally in our windows, and on footmen's hats—query, are those the ventilating hats?—the rooms are as much ventilated by these little tins as they would be by an air from “Don Giovanni.” I will say nothing about pumps; nor, indeed, need we devote more space to mechanical contrivances, since it is from other modes of ventilation that our cause has most to fear. Only one quaint speculation may be mentioned. It is quite certain that in the heats of India, air is not cooled by fanning, nor is it cooled judiciously by damping it. Professor Piazzi Smyth last year suggested this idea: Compress air by a forcing-pump into a close vessel, by so doing you increase its heat, then suddenly allow it to escape into a room, it will expand so much as to be cold, and, mixing with the other air in the apartment, cool the whole mass. This is the last new theory, which has not yet, I think, been tried in practice.

Now, physical ventilation—that which affects to imitate the processes of nature—is a more dangerously specious business. Its chief agent is heat. In nature, it is said, the sun is Lord High Ventilator. He rarefies the air in one place by his heat, elsewhere permits cold, and lets the air be dense; the thin air rises, and the dense air rushes to supply its place; so we have endless winds and currents—nature's ventilating works. It is incredible that sane men should have thought this system fit for imitation. It is a failure. Look at the hot department, where a traveler sometimes has to record that he lay gasping for two hours upon his back, until some one could find some water for him somewhere. Let us call that Africa, and who can say that he enjoys the squalls of wind rushing toward the desert? Let us think of the Persian and the Punic wars, when fleets which had not learned to play bo-peep with ventilating processes, strewed Mediterranean sands with wrecks and corpses. Some day we shall have these mimics of Dame Nature content with nothing smaller than a drawing-room typhoon to carry off the foul air of an evening party; dowagers' caps, young ladies' scarfs, cards, pocket-handkerchiefs, will whirl upon their blast, and then they will be happy. Now their demands are modest, but they mean hurricanes rely upon it; we must not let ourselves be lulled into a false security.

A fire, they say, is in English houses necessary during a large part of the year, is constant during that season when we are most closely shut up in our rooms. The fire, they say, is our most handy and most efficacious ventilator. Oh, yes, we know something about that: we know too well that the fire makes an ascending current, and that the cold air rushes from our doors and windows to the chimney, as from surrounding countries to the burning desert. We [pg 616] know that very well, because every such current is a draught; one cuts into our legs, one gnaws about our necks, and all our backs are cold. We are in the condition of a pious man in Fox's “Martyrs,” about whom I used to read with childish reverence: that after a great deal of frying, during which he had not been turned by the Inquisition-Soyer, he lifted up his voice in verse:

We, all of us, over our Christmas fires, present this choice of raw or roast, and we don't thank your principles of ventilation for it. Then say these pertinacious people, that they also disapprove of draughts; but they don't seem to mind boring holes in a gentleman's floor, or knocking through the sacred walls of home. This is their plan. They say, that you should have, if possible, a pipe connected with the air without, passing behind the cheeks of your stove, and opening under your fire, about, on, or close before your hearth. They say, that from this source the fire will be supplied so well, that it will no longer suck in draughts over your shoulders, and between your legs, from remote corners of the room. They say, moreover, that if this aperture be large enough, it will supply all the fresh air needed in your room, to replace that which has ascended and passed out, through a hole which you are to make in your chimney near the ceiling. They say, that an up-draught will clear this air away so quietly that you will not need even a valve; though you may have one fitted and made ornamental at a trifling cost. They would recommend you to make another hole in the wall opposite your chimney, near the ceiling also, to establish a more effectual current in the upper air. Then, they say, you will have a fresh air, and no draughts. Fresh air, yes, at the expense of a hole in the floor, and two holes in the wall. We might get fresh air, gentlemen, on a much larger scale by pulling the house down. They say, you should not mind the holes. Windows are not architectural beauties, yet we like them for admitting light; and some day it may strike us that the want of ventilators is a neighbor folly to the want of windows.

This they suggest as the best method of adapting our old houses to their new ideas. New houses they would have so built as to include this system of ventilation in their first construction, and so include it as to make it more effectual. But really, if people want to know how to build what are called well-ventilated houses, they must not expect me to tell them; let them buy Mr. Hosking's book on “The proper Regulation of Buildings in Towns.”

Up to this date, as I am glad to know, few architects have heard of ventilation. Under church galleries we doze through the most lively sermons, in public meetings we pant after air, but we have architecture; perhaps an airy style sometimes attempts to comfort us. These circumstances are, possibly, unpleasant at the time, but they assist the cause of general unhealthiness. Long may our architects believe that human lungs are instruments of brass; and let us hope that, when they get a ventilating fit, they will prefer strange machines, pumping, screwing, steaming apparatus. May they dispense then, doctored air, in draughts and mixtures.4

Fresh air in certain favored places—as in Smithfield, for example—is undoubtedly an object of desire. It is exceedingly to be regretted, if the rumors be correct, that the result of a Commission of Inquiry threatens, by removing Smithfield, to destroy the only sound lung this metropolis possesses. The wholesome nature of the smell of cows is quite notorious. Humboldt tells of a sailor who was dying of fever in the close hold of a ship. His end being in sight, some comrades brought him out to die. What Humboldt calls “the fresh air” fell upon him, and, instead of dying, he revived, eventually getting well. I have no doubt that there was a cow on board, and the man smelt her. Now, if so great an effect was produced by the proximity of one cow, how great must be the advantage to the sick in London of a central crowded cattle-market!