One of the essentials in effecting a cure is FRESH AIR; and if this can be had in such form as to give more of oxygen—­the vital element—­than is usually found, the healing processes must be accelerated, beyond doubt.  The family physician will tell you this.  Now, under what circumstances is a larger amount of oxygen found?  What climate affords most, all other things being equal?  It certainly is not a hot climate, nor a variable moist one such as prevails all over the consumptive district which we have indicated at the beginning of this chapter.  It is found in a cool, dry climate, and this condition is had in Minnesota with greater correlative advantages than in any other section of the Union known up to this time.  The atmosphere is composed of two gases, oxygen and nitrogen, and in every one hundred parts of common air there are about seventy-five parts of nitrogen and twenty-five of oxygen, subject to expansion from heat and of contraction from cold.  This accounts in part for the general lassitude felt in a warm atmosphere, while a corresponding degree of vigor obtains in a cold one.  The condensation, the result of a cool temperature, gives to the lungs a much larger amount of oxygen at a single inspiration, and, of course, for the day the difference is truly wonderful.  The blood is borne by each pulsation of the heart to the air-cells of the lungs for vitalization by means of the oxygen inhaled—­the only portion of the air used by the lungs—­giving it a constantly renewing power to energize the whole man.  If a cold climate is attended with great humidity, or raw, chilling winds, the object is defeated and the diseased member aggravated, as would also be the case even if the climate was not a cold, raw one, but was a variable cold one; as then the sudden changes would induce colds, pneumonia, and all the train of ills which terminate in this dire calamity we are so anxious to avoid.

Equability and dryness are the essentials of a climate in which consumptives are to receive new or lengthened leases of life.

The following testimony is of such a high value that no apology need be offered for its introduction here.  It is, in the first case, from one who was sick but is now well, and, in the other, from a party whose observation and character give weight to opinions.

The able and celebrated divine, the Rev. Horace Bushnell, D.D., of Hartford, Conn., in a letter to the Independent, says:—­

“I went to Minnesota early in July, and remained there till the latter part of the May following.  I had spent a winter in Cuba without benefit.  I had spent also nearly a year in California, making a gain in the dry season and a partial loss in the wet season; returning, however, sufficiently improved to resume my labors.  Breaking down again from this only partial recovery, I made the experiment now of Minnesota; and submitting myself, on returning, to a very rigid examination by a physician who did not know at all what verdict had been passed by other physicians before, he said, in accordance with their opinions, ’You have had a difficulty in your right lung, but it is healed.’  I had suspected from my symptoms that it might be so, and the fact appears to be confirmed by the further fact, that I have been slowly, though regularly, gaining all summer.