this is plain and simple:  Carbonic acid detained within four walls accumulates in place of the breath of life—­oxygen—­and narcotizes the excretory function of the skin.  The moment that this great and continual vent of waste and impurity from the system is obstructed, internal derangement ensues in every direction.  All hands, so to speak, are strained to extra duty to discharge the noxious accumulation.  The lungs labor to discharge the load thrown back upon them, with hastened respiration, increased combustion, and feverish heat.  The pores of the mucous membrane in the nose, throat, alimentary canal, or bronchial passages, are forced by an aggravated discharge (or catarrh), and this congestive and inflammatory pressure is a fever also.  There is nothing of “cold” about it except as an auxiliary and antecedent, in cases where an external chill has struck upon nerves already half paralyzed by the universal narcotic—­carbonic acid—­which house dwellers may be said to “smoke” perpetually.

So much for nerve-poison; but blood-poisoning is a still more terrible characteristic of house-protected existence.  It is now the almost universal opinion of the medical profession that the whole class of malarial and zymotic diseases that make such frightful progress and havoc in the most civilized communities, are due to living germs with which the exhalations of organic waste and decay are everywhere loaded in inconceivable numbers.  They are known to multiply themselves many times over, every two or three hours.  They swarm into the blood by millions, through all the absorbents, especially those of the lungs, that drink the atmosphere in which they are suffered to linger and propagate.  Mr. Dancer, the eminent microscopist, counted in a sample from such an atmosphere a number of organized germs equivalent to 3,700,000 in the volume of air hourly inhaled by one person.  That is over 60,000 germs per minute, and about 2,000 in every breath.  In the blood, they still propagate, and feed, and grow, consuming its oxygen, thus defeating its purification, and turning that stream of otherwise healthful and invigorating nutrition into a stream of effete and corrupt matter—­a sewer rather than a river of life—­or at best an impoverished and impure supply for the support of existence.

The same pestilential but invisible hosts of bacteria, mustered and bred in the close filthiness of Oriental cities, and jungles, swarm out as Asiatic cholera on the wings of the wind, sweeping the wide world with havoc.  Settled on the tropical shores of the Eastern Atlantic, they lie in wait for their victims in the sluggish and terrible coast fever.  On the western coast of the same ocean, perhaps from some cause connected with oceanic or atmospheric currents, they make devastating irruptions inland, as yellow fever, in every direction where the walls of their enclosure are low enough to be freely passed.  These, let us remember, are all essentially the same organic poison that is engendered wherever life