r, and of course they know that foul, unventilated
rooms are bad for the health; and yet generation after generation of
men so taught and trained will spend the greater part of their lives
in rooms notorious for their close and impure air, without so much as
an attempt to remedy the evil. A well-ventilated court-room is a
four-leaved clover among court-rooms. Young men are constantly losing
their health at the bar; lung diseases, dyspepsia, follow them up,
gradually sapping their vitality. Some of the brightest ornaments of the
profession have actually fallen dead as they stood pleading,--victims
of the fearful pressure of poisonous and heated air upon the excited
brain. The deaths of Salmon P. Chase of Portland, uncle of our present
Chief Justice, and of Ezekiel Webster, the brother of our great
statesman, are memorable examples of the calamitous effects of the
errors dwelt upon; and yet, strange to say, nothing efficient is done
to mend these errors, and give the body an equal chance with the mind in
the pressure of the world's affairs.

But churches, lecture-rooms, and vestries, and all buildings
devoted especially to the good of the soul, are equally witness of
the mind's disdain of the body's needs, and the body's consequent
revenge upon the soul. In how many of these places has the question
of a thorough provision of fresh air been even considered? People
would never think of bringing a thousand persons into a desert place
and keeping them there without making preparations to feed them.
Bread and butter, potatoes and meat, must plainly be found for them;
but a thousand human beings are put into a building to remain a given
number of hours, and no one asks the question whether means exist
for giving each one the quantum of fresh air needed for his
circulation, and these thousand victims will consent to be slowly
poisoned, gasping, sweating, getting red in the face, with confused
and sleepy brains, while a minister with a yet redder face and a
more oppressed brain struggles and wrestles, through the hot, seething
vapors, to make clear to them the mysteries of faith. How many
churches are there that for six or eight months in the year are never
ventilated at all, except by the accidental opening of doors? The
foul air generated by one congregation is locked up by the sexton
for the use of the next assembly; and so gathers and gathers from
week to week, and month to month, while devout persons upbraid
themselves, and