Ladies,--I have been honoured by a second invitation to address you here,
from the lady to whose public spirit the establishment of these lectures
is due. I dare not refuse it: because it gives me an opportunity of
speaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may seriously
affect your health and happiness, and that of the children with whom you
may have to do. I must apologize if I say many things which are well
known to many persons in this room: they ought to be well known to all;
and it is generally best to assume total ignorance in one's hearers, and
to begin from the beginning.
I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little as
possible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the same time, if
possible, interesting.
I should wish to call this lecture "The Two Breaths:" not merely "The
Breath;" and for this reason: every time you breathe, you breathe two
different breaths; you take in one, you give out another. The
composition of those two breaths is different. Their effects are
different. The breath which has been breathed out must not be breathed
in again. To tell you why it must not would lead me into anatomical
details, not quite in place here as yet: though the day will come, I
trust, when every woman entrusted with the care of children will be
expected to know something about them. But this I may say--Those who
habitually take in fresh breath will probably grow up large, strong,
ruddy, cheerful, active, clear-headed, fit for their work. Those who
habitually take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves,
or any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up at
all, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and tempted
continually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards.
If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from the
breath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel experiment, but
one which people too often try upon themselves, their children, and their
work-people. If you take any small animal with lungs like your own--a
mouse, for instance--and force it to breathe no air but what you have
breathed already; if you put it in a close box, and while you take in
breath from the outer air, send out your breath through a tube, into that
box, the animal will soon faint; if you go on long with this process, it
will die.
Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the notice
of mothers, governesses, and nurses: If you allow a child to get into the
habit of sleeping with its head under the bed-clothes, and thereby
breathing its own breath over and over again, that child will assuredly
grow pale, weak, and ill. Medical men have cases on record of scrofula
appearing in children previously healthy, which could only be accounted
for from this habit, and which ceased when the habit stopped. Let me
again entreat your attention to this undoubted fact.
Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a crowded
room, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors and windows all
shut tight, how often you feel faint--so faint, that you may require
smelling-salts or some other stimulant. The cause of your faintness is
just the same as that of the mouse's fainting in the box: you and your
friends, and, as I shall show you presently, the fire and the candles
likewise, having been all breathing each other's breaths, over and over
again, till the air has become unfit to support life. You are doing your
best to enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpson
tells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at a
Christmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small room
with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut. The atmosphere
of the room was noxious beyond description; and the effect was, that
seven of the party were soon after seized with typhus fever, of which two
died. You are inflicting on yourselves the torments of the poor dog, who
is kept at the Grotto del Cane, near Naples, to be stupified, for the
amusement of visitors, by the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and
brought to life again by being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are
inflicting upon yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of
Calcutta; and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh
air could enter, the candles would soon burn blue--as they do, you know,
when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you yourselves run
the risk of becoming ghosts, and the candles of actually going out.
Of this last fact there is no doubt; for if, instead of putting a mouse
into the box, you will put a lighted candle, and breathe into the tube,
as before, however gently, you will in a short time put the candle out.
Now, how is this? First, what is the difference between the breath you
take in and the breath you give out? And next, why has it a similar
effect on animal life and a lighted candle?
The difference is this. The breath which you take in is, or ought to be,
pure air, composed, on the whole, of oxygen and nitrogen, with a minute
portion of carbonic acid.
The breath which you give out is an impure air, to which has been added,
among other matters which will not support life, an excess of carbonic
acid.
That this is the fact you can prove for yourselves by a simple
experiment. Get a little lime water at the chemist's, and breathe into
it through a glass tube; your breath will at once make the lime-water
milky. The carbonic acid of your breath has laid hold of the lime, and
made it visible as white carbonate of lime--in plain English, as common
chalk.
Now, I do not wish, as I said, to load your memories with scientific
terms: but I beseech you to remember at least these two--oxygen gas and
carbonic acid gas; and to remember that, as surely as oxygen feeds the
fire of life, so surely does carbonic acid put it out.
I say, "the fire of life." In that expression lies the answer to our
second question: Why does our breath produce a similar effect upon the
mouse and the lighted candle? Every one of us is, as it were, a living
fire. Were we not, how could we be always warmer than the air outside
us? There is a process going on perpetually in each of us, similar to
that by which coals are burnt in the fire, oil in a lamp, wax in a
candle, and the earth itself in a volcano. To keep each of those fires
alight, oxygen is needed; and the products of combustion, as they are
called, are more or less the same in each case--carbonic acid and steam.
These facts justify the expression I just made use of--which may have
seemed to some of you fantastical--that the fire and the candles in the
crowded room were breathing the same breath as you were. It is but too
true. An average fire in the grate requires, to keep it burning, as much
oxygen as several human beings do; each candle or lamp must have its
share of oxygen likewise, and that a very considerable one; and an
average gas-burner--pray attend to this, you who live in rooms lighted
with gas--consumes as much oxygen as several candles. All alike are
making carbonic acid. The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up
the chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings and
the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be ventilated.
Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most
terrible, cases of want of ventilation--death by the fumes of charcoal. A
human being shut up in a room, of which every crack is closed, with a pan
of burning charcoal, falls asleep, never to wake again. His inward fire
is competing with the fire of the charcoal for the oxygen of the room;
both are making carbonic acid out of it: but the charcoal, being the
stronger of the two, gets all the oxygen to itself, and leaves the human
being nothing to inhale but the carbonic acid which it has made. The
human being, being the weaker, dies first: but the charcoal dies also.
When it has exhausted all the oxygen of the room, it cools, goes out, and
is found in the morning half-consumed beside its victim. If you put a
giant or an elephant, I should conceive, into that room, instead of a
human being, the case would be reversed for a time: the elephant would
put out the burning charcoal by the carbonic acid from his mighty lungs;
and then, when he had exhausted all the air in the room, die likewise of
his own carbonic acid.
* * * * *
Now, I think, we may see what ventilation means, and why it is needed.
Ventilation means simply letting out the foul air, and letting in the
fresh air; letting out the air which has been breathed by men or by
candles, and letting in the air which has not. To understand how to do
that, we must remember a most simple chemical law, that a gas as it is
warmed expands, and therefore becomes lighter; as it cools, it contracts,
and becomes heavier.
Now the carbonic acid in the breath which comes out of our mouth is warm,
lighter than the air, and rises to the ceiling; and therefore in any
unventilated room full of people, there is a layer of foul air along the
ceiling. You might soon test that for yourselves, if you could mount a
ladder and put your heads there aloft. You do test it for yourselves
when you sit in the galleries of churches and theatres, where the air is
palpably more foul, and therefore more injurious, than down below.
Where, again, work-people are employed in a crowded house of many
storeys, the health of those who work on the upper floors always suffers
most.
In the old monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, when the cages were on
the old plan, tier upon tier, the poor little fellows in the uppermost
tier--so I have been told--always died first of the monkey's
constitutional complaint, consumption, simply from breathing the warm
breath of their friends below. But since the cages have been altered,
and made to range side by side from top to bottom, consumption--I
understand--has vastly diminished among them.
The first question in ventilation, therefore, is to get this carbonic
acid safe out of the room, while it is warm and light and close to the
ceiling; for if you do not, this happens--The carbonic acid gas cools and
becomes heavier; for carbonic acid, at the same temperature as common
air, is so much heavier than common air, that you may actually--if you
are handy enough--turn it from one vessel to another, and pour out for
your enemy a glass of invisible poison. So down to the floor this heavy
carbonic acid comes, and lies along it, just as it lies often in the
bottom of old wells, or old brewers' vats, as a stratum of poison,
killing occasionally the men who descend into it. Hence, as foolish a
practice as I know is that of sleeping on the floor; for towards the
small hours, when the room gets cold, the sleeper on the floor is
breathing carbonic acid.
And here one word to those ladies who interest themselves with the poor.
The poor are too apt in times of distress to pawn their bedsteads and
keep their beds. Never, if you have influence, let that happen. Keep
the bedstead, whatever else may go, to save the sleeper from the carbonic
acid on the floor.
How, then, shall we get rid of the foul air at the top of the room? After
all that has been written and tried on ventilation, I know no simpler
method than putting into the chimney one of Arnott's ventilators, which
may be bought and fixed for a few shillings; always remembering that it
must be fixed into the chimney as near the ceiling as possible. I can
speak of these ventilators from twenty-five years' experience. Living in
a house with low ceilings, liable to become overcharged with carbonic
acid, which produces sleepiness in the evening, I have found that these
ventilators keep the air fresh and pure; and I consider the presence of
one of these ventilators in a room more valuable than three or four feet
additional height of ceiling. I have found, too, that their working
proves how necessary they are, from this simple fact:--You would suppose
that, as the ventilator opens freely into the chimney, the smoke would be
blown down through it in high winds, and blacken the ceiling: but this is
just what does not happen. If the ventilator be at all properly poised,
so as to shut with a violent gust of wind, it will at all other moments
keep itself permanently open; proving thereby that there is an up-draught
of heated air continually escaping from the ceiling up the chimney.
Another very simple method of ventilation is employed in those excellent
cottages which Her Majesty has built for her labourers round Windsor.
Over each door a sheet of perforated zinc, some 18 inches square, is
fixed; allowing the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the
ceiling of the passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape
into the roof. Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by
piercing the windows, or otherwise. And here let me give one hint to all
builders of houses. If possible, let bedroom windows open at the top as
well as at the bottom.
Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not only on
parents and educators, but on those who employ work-people, and above all
on those who employ young women in shops or in work-rooms. What their
condition may be in this city I know not; but most painful it has been to
me in other places, when passing through warehouses or work-rooms, to see
the pale, sodden, and, as the French would say "etiolated" countenances
of the girls who were passing the greater part of the day in them; and
painful, also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made
them unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was
altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the seeds of
death, not only in the present but in future generations.
Why should this be? Every one will agree that good ventilation is
necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without fresh
air. Do they not see that by the same reasoning good ventilation is
necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain well without fresh
air? Let me entreat those who employ women in work-rooms, if they have
no time to read through such books as Dr. Andrew Combe's 'Physiology
applied to Health and Education,' and Madame de Wahl's 'Practical Hints
on the Moral, Mental, and Physical Training of Girls,' to procure certain
tracts published by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies'
Sanitary Association; especially one which bears on this subject, 'The
Black-Hole in our own Bedrooms;' Dr. Lankester's 'School Manual of
Health;' or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan
Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.
I look forward--I say it openly--to some period of higher civilisation,
when the Acts of Parliament for the ventilation of factories and
workshops shall be largely extended, and made far more stringent; when
officers of public health shall be empowered to enforce the ventilation
of every room in which persons are employed for hire; and empowered also
to demand a proper system of ventilation for every new house, whether in
country or in town. To that, I believe, we must come: but I had sooner
far see these improvements carried out, as befits the citizens of a free
country, in the spirit of the Gospel rather than in that of the Law;
carried out, not compulsorily and from fear of fines, but voluntarily,
from a sense of duty, honour, and humanity. I appeal, therefore, to the
good feeling of all whom it may concern, whether the health of those whom
they employ, and therefore the supply of fresh air which they absolutely
need, are not matters for which they are not, more or less, responsible
to their country and their God.
And if any excellent person of the old school should answer me--"Why make
all this fuss about ventilation? Our forefathers got on very well
without it"--I must answer that, begging their pardons, our ancestors did
nothing of the kind. Our ancestors got on usually very ill in these
matters: and when they got on well, it was because they had good
ventilation in spite of themselves.
First. They got on very ill. To quote a few remarkable instances of
longevity, or to tell me that men were larger and stronger on the average
in old times, is to yield to the old fallacy of fancying that savages
were peculiarly healthy, because those who were seen were active and
strong. The simple answer is, that the strong alone survived, while the
majority died from the severity of the training. Savages do not increase
in number; and our ancestors increased but very slowly for many
centuries. I am not going to disgust my audience with statistics of
disease: but knowing something, as I happen to do, of the social state
and of the health of the Middle and Elizabethan Ages, I have no
hesitation in saying that the average of disease and death was far
greater then than it is now. Epidemics of many kinds, typhus, ague,
plague--all diseases which were caused more or less by bad air--devastated
this land and Europe in those days with a horrible intensity, to which
even the choleras of our times are mild. The back streets, the
hospitals, the gaols, the barracks, the camps--every place in which any
large number of persons congregated, were so many nests of pestilence,
engendered by uncleanliness, which denied alike the water which was drunk
and the air which was breathed; and as a single fact, of which the tables
of insurance companies assure us, the average of human life in England
has increased twenty-five per cent. since the reign of George I., owing
simply to our more rational and cleanly habits of life.
But secondly, I said that when our ancestors got on well, they did so
because they got ventilation in spite of themselves. Luckily for them,
their houses were ill-built; their doors and windows would not shut. They
had lattice-windowed houses, too; to live in one of which, as I can
testify from long experience, is as thoroughly ventilating as living in a
lantern with the horn broken out. It was because their houses were full
of draughts, and still more, in the early middle age, because they had no
glass, and stopped out the air only by a shutter at night, that they
sought for shelter rather than for fresh air, of which they sometimes had
too much; and, to escape the wind, built their houses in holes, such as
that in which the old city of Winchester stands. Shelter, I believe, as
much as the desire to be near fish in Lent, and to occupy the rich
alluvium of the valleys, made the monks of Old England choose the river-
banks for the sites of their abbeys. They made a mistake therein, which,
like most mistakes, did not go unpunished. These low situations,
especially while the forests were yet thick on the hills around, were the
perennial haunts of fever and ague, produced by subtle vegetable poisons,
carried in the carbonic acid given off by rotting vegetation. So there,
again, they fell in with man's old enemy--bad air.
Still, as long as the doors and windows did not shut, some free
circulation of air remained. But now, our doors and windows shut only
too tight. We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced
the draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its wide
corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves. We have
done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up hermetically from the
outer air, and to breathe our own breaths over and over again; and we pay
the penalty of it in a thousand ways unknown to our ancestors, through
whose rooms all the winds of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to
shelter themselves from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen
round the fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the
four-post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher
civilisation. We therefore absolutely require to make for ourselves the
very ventilation from which our ancestors tried to escape.
But, ladies, there is an old and true proverb, that you may bring a horse
to the water, but you cannot make him drink. And in like wise it is too
true, that you may bring people to the fresh air, but you cannot make
them breathe it. Their own folly, or the folly of their parents and
educators, prevents their lungs being duly filled and duly emptied.
Therefore, the blood is not duly oxygenated, and the whole system goes
wrong.
Paleness, weakness, consumption, scrofula, and too many other ailments,
are the consequences of ill-filled lungs. For without well-filled lungs,
robust health is impossible.
And if any one shall answer--"We do not want robust health so much as
intellectual attainment. The mortal body, being the lower organ, must
take its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be, to the higher
organ--the immortal mind:"--To such I reply, You cannot do it. The laws
of nature, which are the express will of God, laugh such attempts to
scorn. Every organ of the body is formed out of the blood; and if the
blood be vitiated, every organ suffers in proportion to its delicacy; and
the brain, being the most delicate and highly specialised of all organs,
suffers most of all and soonest of all, as every one knows who has tried
to work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order. Nay,
the very morals will suffer. From ill-filled lungs, which signify ill-
repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not merely of disease, but
of folly, temper, laziness, intemperance, madness, and, let me tell you
fairly, crime--the sum of which will never be known till that great day
when men shall be called to account for all deeds done in the body,
whether they be good or evil.
I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe's 'Physiology,'
especially chapters iv. and vii.; and also to chapter x. of Madame de
Wahl's excellent book. I will only say this shortly, that the three most
common causes of ill-filled lungs, in children and in young ladies, are
stillness, silence, and stays.
First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise. A girl is kept
for hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do which she must lean
forward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly attempts to make her sit
upright, and thereby keep the spine in an attitude for which Nature did
not intend it, she is thereby doing her best to bring on that disease, so
fearfully common in girls' schools, lateral curvature of the spine. But
practically the girl will stoop forward. And what happens? The lower
ribs are pressed into the body, thereby displacing more or less something
inside. The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of the
lungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or emptied; and
an excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom of them. What
follows? Frequent sighing to get rid of it; heaviness of head;
depression of the whole nervous system under the influence of the poison
of the lungs; and when the poor child gets up from her weary work, what
is the first thing she probably does? She lifts up her chest, stretches,
yawns, and breathes deeply--Nature's voice, Nature's instinctive cure,
which is probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called "lolling" is.
As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentially
ungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw. As if "lolling,"
which means putting the body in the attitude of the most perfect ease
compatible with a fully expanded chest, was not in itself essentially
graceful, and to be seen in every reposing figure in Greek bas-reliefs
and vases; graceful, and like all graceful actions, healthful at the same
time. The only tolerably wholesome attitude of repose, which I see
allowed in average school-rooms, is lying on the back on the floor, or on
a sloping board, in which case the lungs must be fully expanded. But
even so, a pillow, or some equivalent, ought to be placed under the small
of the back: or the spine will be strained at its very weakest point.
I now go on to the second mistake--enforced silence. Moderate reading
aloud is good: but where there is any tendency to irritability of throat
or lungs, too much moderation cannot be used. You may as well try to
cure a diseased lung by working it, as to cure a lame horse by galloping
him. But where the breathing organs are of average health, let it be
said once and for all, that children and young people cannot make too
much noise. The parents who cannot bear the noise of their children have
no right to have brought them into the world. The schoolmistress who
enforces silence on her pupils is committing--unintentionally no doubt,
but still committing--an offence against reason, worthy only of a
convent. Every shout, every burst of laughter, every song--nay, in the
case of infants, as physiologists well know, every moderate fit of
crying--conduces to health, by rapidly filling and emptying the lung, and
changing the blood more rapidly from black to red, that is, from death to
life. Andrew Combe tells a story of a large charity school, in which the
young girls were, for the sake of their health, shut up in the hall and
school-room during play hours, from November till March, and no romping
or noise allowed. The natural consequences were, the great majority of
them fell ill; and I am afraid that a great deal of illness has been from
time to time contracted in certain school-rooms, simply through this one
cause of enforced silence. Some cause or other there must be for the
amount of ill-health and weakliness which prevails especially among girls
of the middle classes in towns, who have not, poor things, the
opportunities which richer girls have, of keeping themselves in strong
health by riding, skating, archery--that last quite an admirable exercise
for the chest and lungs, and far preferable to croquet, which involves
too much unwholesome stooping.--Even playing at ball, if milliners and
shop-girls had room to indulge in one after their sedentary work, might
bring fresh spirits to many a heart, and fresh colour to many a cheek. I
spoke just now of the Greeks. I suppose you will all allow that the
Greeks were, as far as we know, the most beautiful race which the world
ever saw. Every educated man knows that they were also the cleverest of
all races; and, next to his Bible, thanks God for Greek literature.
Now, these people had made physical as well as intellectual education a
science as well as a study. Their women practised graceful, and in some
cases even athletic, exercises. They developed, by a free and healthy
life, those figures which remain everlasting and unapproachable models of
human beauty: but--to come to my third point--they wore no stays. The
first mention of stays that I have ever found is in the letters of dear
old Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene, on the Greek coast of Africa, about four
hundred years after the Christian era. He tells us how, when he was
shipwrecked on a remote part of the coast, and he and the rest of the
passengers were starving on cockles and limpets, there was among them a
slave girl out of the far East, who had a pinched wasp-waist, such as you
may see on the old Hindoo sculptures, and such as you may see in any
street in a British town. And when the Greek ladies of the neighbourhood
found her out, they sent for her from house to house, to behold, with
astonishment and laughter, this new and prodigious waist, with which it
seemed to them it was impossible for a human being to breathe or live;
and they petted the poor girl, and fed her, as they might a dwarf or a
giantess, till she got quite fat and comfortable, while her owners had
not enough to eat. So strange and ridiculous seemed our present fashion
to the descendants of those who, centuries before, had imagined, because
they had seen living and moving, those glorious statues which we pretend
to admire, but refuse to imitate.
It seems to me that a few centuries hence, when mankind has learnt to
fear God more, and therefore to obey more strictly those laws of nature
and of science which are the will of God--it seems to me, I say, that in
those days the present fashion of tight lacing will be looked back upon
as a contemptible and barbarous superstition, denoting a very low level
of civilisation in the peoples which have practised it. That for
generations past women should have been in the habit--not to please men,
who do not care about the matter as a point of beauty--but simply to vie
with each other in obedience to something called fashion--that they
should, I say, have been in the habit of deliberately crushing that part
of the body which should be specially left free, contracting and
displacing their lungs, their heart, and all the most vital and important
organs, and entailing thereby disease, not only on themselves but on
their children after them; that for forty years past physicians should
have been telling them of the folly of what they have been doing: and
that they should as yet, in the great majority of cases, not only turn a
deaf ear to all warnings, but actually deny the offence, of which one
glance of the physician or the sculptor, who know what shape the human
body ought to be, brings them in guilty: this, I say, is an instance
of--what shall I call it?--which deserves at once the lash, not merely of
the satirist, but of any theologian who really believes that God made the
physical universe. Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common sense for a
moment. When any one chooses a horse or a dog, whether for strength, for
speed, or for any other useful purpose, the first thing almost to be
looked at is the girth round the ribs; the room for heart and lungs.
Exactly in proportion to that will be the animal's general healthiness,
power of endurance, and value in many other ways. If you will look at
eminent lawyers and famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age,
you will see that in every case they are men, like the late Lord
Palmerston, and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not
merely in the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had,
therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to clear
the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole body. Now,
it is just these lower ribs, across which the diaphragm is stretched like
the head of a drum, which stays contract to a minimum. If you advised
owners of horses and hounds to put their horses or their hounds into
stays, and lace them up tight, in order to increase their beauty, you
would receive, I doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very
decided, refusal to do that which would spoil not merely the animals
themselves, but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come. And
if you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no doubt,
again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply--if he was a
really educated man--that to comply with your request would involve his
giving up public work, under the probable penalty of being dead within
the twelvemonth.
And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical, is
spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and other
complaints which are the result of this habit of tight lacing, is known
partly to the medical men, who lift up their voices in vain, and known
fully to Him who will not interfere with the least of His own physical
laws to save human beings from the consequences of their own wilful
folly.
And now--to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts--What becomes of
this breath which passes from your lips? Is it merely harmful; merely
waste? God forbid! God has forbidden that anything should be merely
harmful or merely waste in this so wise and well-made world. The
carbonic acid which passes from your lips at every breath--ay, even that
which oozes from the volcano crater when the eruption is past--is a
precious boon to thousands of things of which you have daily need. Indeed
there is a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the
girl, from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the
carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure
carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a diamond.
Nay, it may go--in such a world of transformations do we live--to make
atoms of coal strata, which shall lie buried for ages beneath deep seas,
shall be upheaved in continents which are yet unborn, and there be burnt
for the use of a future race of men, and resolved into their original
elements. Coal, wise men tell us, is on the whole breath and sunlight;
the breath of living creatures who have lived in the vast swamps and
forests of some primaeval world, and the sunlight which transmuted that
breath into the leaves and stems of trees, magically locked up for ages
in that black stone, to become, when it is burnt at last, light and
carbonic acid, as it was at first. For though you must not breathe your
breath again, you may at least eat your breath, if you will allow the sun
to transmute it for you into vegetables; or you may enjoy its fragrance
and its colour in the shape of a lily or a rose. When you walk in a
sunlit garden, every word you speak, every breath you breathe, is feeding
the plants and flowers around. The delicate surface of the green leaves
absorbs the carbonic acid, and parts it into its elements, retaining the
carbon to make woody fibre, and courteously returning you the oxygen to
mingle with the fresh air, and be inhaled by your lungs once more. Thus
do you feed the plants; just as the plants feed you; while the great life-
giving sun feeds both; and the geranium standing in the sick child's
window does not merely rejoice his eye and mind by its beauty and
freshness, but repays honestly the trouble spent on it; absorbing the
breath which the child needs not, and giving to him the breath which he
needs.
So are the services of all things constituted according to a Divine and
wonderful order, and knit together in mutual dependence and mutual
helpfulness.--A fact to be remembered with hope and comfort; but also
with awe and fear. For as in that which is above nature, so in nature
itself; he that breaks one physical law is guilty of all. The whole
universe, as it were, takes up arms against him; and all nature, with her
numberless and unseen powers, is ready to avenge herself on him, and on
his children after him, he knows not when nor where. He, on the other
hand, who obeys the laws of nature with his whole heart and mind, will
find all things working together to him for good. He is at peace with
the physical universe. He is helped and befriended alike by the sun
above his head and the dust beneath his feet: because he is obeying the
will and mind of Him who made sun, and dust, and all things; and who has
given them a law which cannot be broken.