nd
decay.

The want of suitable ventilation in school-rooms, recitation-rooms,
lecture-rooms, offices, court-rooms, conference-rooms, and vestries,
where young students of law, medicine, and theology acquire their
earlier practice, is something simply appalling. Of itself it would
answer for men the question, why so many thousand glad, active
children come to a middle life without joy,--a life whose best estate
is a sort of slow, plodding endurance. The despite and hatred which
most men seem to feel for God's gift of fresh air, and their
resolution to breathe as little of it as possible, could only come
from a long course of education, in which they have been accustomed to
live without it. Let any one notice the conduct of our American
people traveling in railroad cars. We will suppose that about half of
them are what might be called well-educated people, who have learned
in books, or otherwise, that the air breathed from the lungs is laden
with impurities,--that it is noxious and poisonous; and yet, travel
with these people half a day, and you would suppose from their actions
that they considered the external air as a poison created expressly to
injure them, and that the only course of safety lay in keeping the
cars hermetically sealed, and breathing over and over the vapor from
each others' lungs. If a person in despair at the intolerable foulness
raises a window, what frowns from all the neighboring seats,
especially from great rough-coated men, who always seem the first to
be apprehensive! The request to "put down that window" is almost sure
to follow a moment or two of fresh air. In vain have rows of
ventilators been put in the tops of some of the cars, for conductors
and passengers are both of one mind, that these ventilators are inlets
of danger, and must be kept carefully closed.

Railroad traveling in America is systematically, and one would think
carefully, arranged so as to violate every possible law of health. The
old rule to keep the head cool and the feet warm is precisely
reversed. A red-hot stove heats the upper stratum of air to
oppression, while a stream of cold air is constantly circulating about
the lower extremities. The most indigestible and unhealthy substances
conceivable are generally sold in the cars or at way-stations for the
confusion and distress of the stomach. Rarely can a traveler obtain so
innocent a thing as a plain good sandwich of bread and meat, while
pie, cake, doughnuts, and all