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Page 6
What is this air, seemingly so hard to secure, so hard to hold as part of
our daily life, without which we can not live, and which we yet
contentedly poison nine times out of ten?
Oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid, and watery vapor; the last two being a
small portion of the bulk, oxygen and nitrogen making up four-fifths.
Small as the proportion of oxygen seems, an increase of but one-fifth more
would be destruction. It is the life-giver, but undiluted would be the
life-destroyer; and the three-fifths of nitrogen act as its diluent. No
other element possesses the same power. Fires and light-giving combustion
could not exist an instant without oxygen. Its office seems that of
universal destruction. By its action decay begins in meat or vegetables
and fruits; and it is for this reason, that, to preserve them, all oxygen
must be driven out by bringing them to the boiling point, and sealing them
up in jars to which no air can find entrance. With only undiluted oxygen
to breathe, the tissues would dry and shrivel, fuel burn with a fury none
could withstand, and every operation of nature be conducted with such
energy as soon to exhaust and destroy all power. But "a mixture of the
fiery oxygen and inert nitrogen gives us the golden mean. The oxygen now
quietly burns the fuel in our stoves, and keeps us warm; combines with the
oil in our lamps, and gives us light; corrodes our bodies, and gives us
strength; cleanses the air, and keeps it fresh and invigorating; sweetens
foul water, and makes it wholesome; works all around us and within us a
constant miracle, yet with such delicacy and quietness, we never perceive
or think of it, until we see it with the eye of science."
Food and air are the two means by which bodies live. In the full-grown
man, whose weight will average about one hundred and fifty-four pounds,
one hundred and eleven pounds is oxygen drawn from the air we breathe.
Only when food has been dissolved in the stomach, absorbed at last into
the blood, and by means of circulation brought into contact with the
oxygen of the air taken into our lungs, can it begin to really feed and
nourish the body; so that the lungs may, after all, be regarded as the
true stomach, the other being not much more than the food-receptacle.
Take these lungs, made up within of branching tubes, these in turn formed
by myriads of air-cells, and each air-cell owning its network of minute
cells called _capillaries_. To every air-cell is given a blood-vessel
bringing blood from the heart, which finds its way through every capillary
till it reaches another blood-vessel that carries it back to the heart. It
leaves the heart charged with carbonic acid and watery vapor. It returns,
if pure air has met it in the lung, with all corruption destroyed, a
dancing particle of life. But to be life, and not slow death, thirty-three
hogsheads of air must pass daily into the lungs, and twenty-eight pounds
of blood journey from heart to lungs and back again three times in each
hour. It rests wholly with ourselves, whether this wonderful tide, ebbing
and flowing with every breath, shall exchange its poisonous and clogging
carbonic acid and watery vapor for life-giving oxygen, or retain it to
weigh down and debilitate every nerve in the body.
With every thought and feeling some actual particles of brain and nerve
are dissolved, and sent floating on this crimson current. With every
motion of a muscle, whether great or small, with every process that can
take place in the body, this ceaseless change of particles is going on.
Wherever oxygen finds admission, its union with carbon to form carbonic
acid, or with hydrogen to form water, produces heat. The waste of the body
is literally burned up by the oxygen; and it is this burning which means
the warmth of a living body, its absence giving the stony cold of the
dead. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" may well be the
literal question for each day of our lives; and "pure air" alone can
secure genuine life. Breathing bad air reduces all the processes of the
body, lessens vitality; and thus, one in poor health will suffer more from
bad air than those who have become thoroughly accustomed to it. If
weakened vitality were the only result, it would not be so serious a
matter; but scrofula is soon fixed upon such constitutions, beginning with
its milder form as in consumption, but ending in the absolute rottenness
of bone and tissue. The invalid may live in the healthiest climate, pass
hours each day in the open air, and yet undo or neutralize much of the
good of this by sleeping in an unventilated room at night. Diseased
joints, horrible affections of the eye or ear or skin, are inevitable. The
greatest living authorities on lung-diseases pronounce deficient
ventilation the chief cause of consumption, and more fatal _than all other
causes put together_; and, even where food and clothing are both
unwholesome, free air has been found able to counteract their effect.
In the country the balance ordained in nature has its compensating power.
The poisonous carbonic acid thrown off by lungs and body is absorbed by
vegetation whose food it is, and which in every waving leaf or blade of
grass returns to us the oxygen we demand. Shut in a close room all day, or
even in a tolerably ventilated one, there may be no sense of closeness;
but go to the open air for a moment, and, if the nose has not been
hopelessly ruined by want of education, it will tell unerringly the degree
of oxygen wanting and required.
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