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Normal Air.--Contamination of the Air.--Test for Carbonic Acid in Air.--Diseases caused by Foul Air.--Composition of Sewer-Air.--Ground Air.--Ventilation.--Smoky Chimneys.

Privy-Vaults.--Tanks.--Pails.--Earth-Closets.--Water-Carriage.--Plumbing Regulations of New York City Board of Health.--Explanatory Remarks.--Drainage of Country Houses.--Subsoil Drainage.--Defective Drainage.--Sources of Bad Odors.--Examination of House-Drainage.--Peppermint Test.--Summary.--Exclusion of Ground-Air.

Directions issued by the National Board of Health.--Comments.--Precautions in Special Diseases.

Adulterations, and Methods of detecting them.

Pollution of Water.--Filters.--Tests for Impurities.--Precautions.

" B.--PLUMBERS' MATERIALS 100-102

INDEX 103

HAND-BOOK

SANITARY INFORMATION.

Necessary to continued good health are GOOD AIR, GOOD FOOD, and GOOD WATER. It is the object of Sanitary Science to secure these.

AIR.

Normal air contains 79 per cent of nitrogen, 20.96 per cent of oxygen, and .04 per cent of carbonic acid.

Oxygen supports animal life; carbonic acid, vegetable life; and the use of the nitrogen, otherwise than as a diluent, is not known.

Very pure air contains 78.98 per cent of nitrogen, 20.99 per cent of oxygen, and .03 per cent of carbonic acid.

Air begins to be very bad when the oxygen is reduced to 20.60 parts in 100. In mines, where candles go out, oxygen is reduced to 18.50 parts in 100, and, in the worst specimen yet examined by Angus Smith, to 18.27. Air in which the percentage of oxygen has been reduced to 17.20 is very difficult to remain in for many minutes.

Aside from impurities due to local causes, the purest air is found from six to forty feet above the ground, and the most impure from seventy to ninety feet, where the air from chimneys is poured forth.

An adult man, in ordinary work, gives off in twenty-four hours from twelve to eighteen cubic feet of carbonic acid, according to his size; women, children, and old persons less.

Edward Smith found that an adult asleep exhaled about nineteen grains of carbonic acid per hour, and, when he walked three miles an hour, the amount was increased to 100.6 grains.

W. R. Nichols, of Boston, found in passenger-cars 23.2 parts of carbonic acid to 10,000 parts of air, and in the Berkeley Street sewer 10.4 parts per 10,000. Wilson found in Portsmouth Prison, in cells containing six hundred and fourteen cubic feet of air, always occupied, 7.20 parts per 10,000, and in cells containing two hundred and ten cubic feet, occupied only at night, 10.44 per 10,000.

Besides the carbonic acid, there is exhaled from the lungs a small amount of organic matter, of unknown composition. It forms a glutinous coating on the furniture, walls, and windows of closed rooms, decomposes rapidly, imparts a peculiarly offensive odor to the air of a badly-ventilated room, and poisons those who inhale it. Its quantity is so small that it has so far defied analysis. In a room contaminated by respiration alone, the odor of this substance begins to be perceived when the carbonic acid has increased to about 7 parts in 10,000, and 10 parts in 10,000 may be considered the maximum amount of carbonic acid allowable in dwellings.

The following table shows how much carbonic acid artificial lights produce per hour:

Petroleum, slit-burner, 10 candle-light, 1.98 cubic feet, Petroleum, round-burner, 7.6 " 2.15 " Oil-lamp, 4 " 1.09 " Candle, 1 " .39 " Coal-gas, slit-burner, 7.8 " 3.25 " Coal-gas, flat-burner, 10 " 3 "

A five-foot gas-burner produces as much carbonic acid per hour as five men.

As the most poisonous element of the breath can not readily be detected by analysis, the amount of carbonic acid is taken as a measure of the impurity of air contaminated by respiration.

Shake up a definite volume of the air in a closed vessel with a definite amount of lime-water. The carbonic acid unites with the lime, forming carbonate of lime. This compound, being insoluble in water, renders it turbid. The degree of turbidity may be judged of by looking through the water at a cross marked in lead-pencil on the inside of a piece of paper pasted on the opposite side of the bottle, and a standard may be fixed by shaking up ordinary external air in a sixteen-ounce bottle, as described below, which will show the degree of turbidity produced by 4 parts of carbonic acid in 10,000. Lime-water can be bought of a druggist, or made by shaking distilled water with slaked lime, allowing it to settle, and pouring off the clear liquid. With a common hand-ball syringe, the end of the rubber tube resting on the bottom of the bottle, pump in air, until the bottle is filled with the air to be tested. Put in half an ounce of lime-water, cork the bottle, and shake it up well. Let it stand for five minutes, and if the water becomes turbid, as if a little milk had been dropped into it, the presence of carbonic acid in the air will be indicated in the following proportions.

Size of bottle. Amount of lime-water. Parts in 10,000.

Air contaminated by the products of respiration and by bodily emanations contains substances which have been ejected from human bodies as useless or injurious. What all systems reject can not be healthy for any, and it is found that long-continued exposure in an atmosphere laden with these impurities produces anaemia, general debility, and poor nutrition, conditions likely to result in the development of scrofula and consumption. It is believed, too, that typhus fever may originate in this manner, while when such poisons are inhaled in a more concentrated form, as in the famous Black Hole of Calcutta, nausea, vertigo, convulsions, and even death are produced.

Of such diseases, the dangerous ones are small-pox, measles, scarlet fever, typhus fever, and diphtheria, and their contagious quality is marked very nearly in the order in which they are here mentioned.

The less harmful of these diseases are whooping-cough, chicken-pox, mumps, and German measles.

There is strong evidence that consumption is contagious, though not as markedly so as the diseases above enumerated.

The contents of cesspools, privy-vaults, and sewers, are generally composed of discharges from the bowels and kidneys, various matters washed off from the bodies of animals and from culinary and household utensils, and dissolved soap, constituting a mixture which rapidly decomposes and affords a fine soil for the nourishment and propagation of microscopic organisms.

Professor Nichols analyzed the air of the Berkeley Street sewer in Boston, a type of a badly-constructed and badly-ventilated sewer. The sulphureted hydrogen, etc., were in too small quantity to be measured. The highest percentages found were, of oxygen, 20.90; of nitrogen, 79.26; of carbonic acid, .4 . The lowest were, oxygen, 20.48; nitrogen, 78.89; and carbonic acid, .05 .

MODERN ENGLISH BOOKS OF POWER

MACAULAY'S ESSAYS IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS STYLE AND LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF CENTURY.

Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800, but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older. Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with those who love the intellectual life.

Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history. Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the conjuror's skill.

Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own, ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews, George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune, with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all, his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.

With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.

Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to display his remarkable knowledge.

Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.

Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.

Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will always retain his grip on readers of English blood.

SCOTT AND HIS WAVERLEY NOVELS

THE GREATEST NOVELIST THE WORLD HAS KNOWN--HE MADE HISTORY REAL AND CREATED CHARACTERS THAT WILL NEVER DIE.

It is as difficult to sum up in a brief article the work and the influence of Sir Walter Scott as it is to make an estimate of Shakespeare, for Scott holds the same position in English prose fiction that Shakespeare holds in English poetry. In neither department is there any rival. In sheer creative force Scott stands head and shoulders above every other English novelist, and he has no superior among the novelists of any other nation. He has made Scotland and the Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and the Spaniards a reality for all times.

Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his friends about him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.

It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his tendency to long introductions, and his fondness for description. These critics will tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater literary artists than Scott, just as they tell you that Thackeray and Dickens do not deserve a place among the foremost of English novelists. This petty, finical criticism, which would measure everything by its own rigid rule of literary art, loses sight of the great primal fact that Scott created more real characters and told more good stories than any other novelist, and that his work will outlive that of all his detractors. It ignores the fact that Thackeray's wit, pathos, tenderness and knowledge of human nature make him immortal in spite of many defects. It forgets that Dickens' humor, joy of living and keen desire to help his fellow man will bring him thousands of readers after all the apostles of realism are buried under the dust of oblivion.

Scott had the ideal training for a great historical novelist. Yet his literary successes in verse and prose were the result of accident. It is needless here to review his life. The son of a mediocre Scotch lawyer, he inherited from his father his capacity for work and his passion for system and order. From his mother he drew his love of reading and his fondness for old tales of the Scotch border. Like so many famous writers, his early education was desultory, but he had the free run of a fine library, and when he was a mere schoolboy his reading of the best English classics had been wider and more thorough than that of his teachers.

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