Rensselaer Union, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 July 1870 — Want of Ventilation. [ARTICLE]

Want of Ventilation.

The usual modes of warming buildings are attended by many evils, which directly affect the health and lives of our fs.Tnilios, who are ohlywf Co remain within doors by far the greater pajt of the time. The entire absence of the means of ventilation [in most cases, add the failures which have followed most attempts in this direction, make the subject pne of the most vital importance. Bad air is a dow poisoa; that is the trouble. People go oh taking it into their lungs day after day and night after Eight. They grow pale, their lungs suffer, the circulation is languid, they take colds readily; the chest, the stomach, the skin become disordered, and a host of chronic diseases attack them. A little carbonic acid taken every day does net kill a man. It is almost a pity it don’t. • If a red-hot stove or a furnace destroyed instantly one man in every town daily for a week, there might be some salvation for the nation. If, instead of fainting away in crowded and badly ventilated public assemblies, people occasionally died outright in convqisions, the authorities would take the matter in hand, and make it penal for the owners of such buildings to open them for public use without attending to the proper conditions for the preservation of health. When a thing is only a slow poison, the age is in too much of a hurry to attend to it. Thousands of dollars are lavished on luxuries and superfluities, while the air in our dwellings is poisoned and burnt by heating arrangements whose only recommendation is that they are cheap. In other words, our wealth’est men are too poor to afford pure air for themselves and families. The vital life element is supplied in their green-houses and conservatories regardless of expense, while scions of the human stock, buds and blossoms of immortality, are permitted to wither and decay in the sickly atmosphere produced by stoves and hot air furnaces.—Wew York Evening Pott.