anliness, within and without your house, ventilation is
comparatively useless. In certain foul districts of London, poor people
used to object to open their windows and doors because of the foul
smells that came in. Rich people like to have their stables and dunghill
near their houses. But does it ever occur to them that with many
arrangements of this kind it would be safer to keep the windows shut
than open? You cannot have the air of the house pure with dung heaps
under the windows. These are common all over London. And yet people are
surprised that their children, brought up in large "well-aired"
nurseries and bed-rooms suffer from children's epidemics. If they
studied Nature's laws in the matter of children's health, they would not
be so surprised.

There are other ways of having filth inside a house besides having dirt
in heaps. Old papered walls of years' standing, dirty carpets,
uncleansed furniture, are just as ready sources of impurity to the air
as if there were a dung-heap in the basement. People are so unaccustomed
from education and habits to consider how to make a home healthy, that
they either never think of it at all, and take every disease as a matter
of course, to be "resigned to" when it comes "as from the hand of
Providence;" or if they ever entertain the idea of preserving the health
of their household as a duty, they are very apt to commit all kinds of
"negligences and ignorances" in performing it.

[Sidenote: Light.]

5. A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house,
always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth, and promotes scrofula,
rickets, &c., among the children.

People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill they
cannot get well again in it. More will be said about this farther on.

[Sidenote: Three common errors in managing the health of houses.]

Three out of many "negligences and ignorances" in managing the health of
houses generally, I will here mention as specimens--1. That the female
head in charge of any building does not think it necessary to visit
every hole and corner of it every day. How can she expect those who are
under her to be more careful to maintain her house in a healthy
condition than she who is in charge of it?--2. That it is not considered
essential to air, to sun, and to clean rooms while uninhabited; which is
simply ignoring the first elementary notion of sanitary things, and
laying the ground ready for all kinds of dis