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