of the air by lateral wind currents and produce stagnation.  Hence, as Mr. E.J.  Symons has truly observed, “a lovely spot embowered in trees and embraced by hills is usually characterized by a damp, misty, cold, and stagnant atmosphere,” a condition of climate which is obviously unfavorable to good health and especially favorable to the development of consumption and rheumatism, our two most prevalent diseases.

Now, if we examine the surroundings of many of our suburban villas and country houses of the better sort, we shall find them embowered in trees, and subject to all the insanitary climatic conditions just mentioned.  The custom almost everywhere prevails of blocking out of view other houses, roads, etc., by belts of trees, often planted on raised mounds of earth, and surrounded by high close walls or palings, from a foolish ambition of seeming to live “quite in the country.”

This is a most unwise proceeding from a sanitary point of view, and should be protested against as strongly by medical men as defective drainage and bad water supply.  Many houses stand under the very drip and shadow of trees, and “the grounds” of others are inclosed by dense belts of trees and shrubs, which convert them into veritable reservoirs of damp, stagnant air, often loaded with the effluvia of decaying leaves and other garden refuse, a condition of atmosphere very injurious to health, and answerable for much of the neuralgia of a malarious kind, of which we have heard so much lately.  A very slight belt of trees suffices to obstruct the lateral circulation of the air, and if the sun be also excluded the natural upward currents are also prevented.

As far back as 1695 Lancisi recognized the influence of slight belts of trees in preventing the spread of malaria in Rome, and the cold, damp, stagnant air of spaces inclosed by trees is easily demonstrated by the wet and dry bulb thermometer, or even by the ordinary sensations of the body.  A dry garden, on gravel, of three acres in extent in Surrey, surrounded by trees, is generally three or four degrees colder than the open common beyond the trees; and a large pond in a pine wood twenty miles from London afforded skating for ninety consecutive days in the winter of 1885-86, while during the greater part of the time the lakes in the London parks were free from ice.

The speculative builder has more sins to answer for than the faulty construction of houses.  He generally begins his operations by cutting down all the fine old trees which occupy the ground, and which from their size and isolation are more beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created.  It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives it from a silly notion, amounting to tree worship, which prohibits the cutting down of trees, no matter how injudicious may have been the planting of them in the first instance from a sanitary or picturesque point of view.