effective respiration all the more necessary for the removal from the
blood of whatever nutritive matter has been taken beyond the needs of
the system, and the latter inevitably diminishes the respiratory
motions to the lowest point consistent with physical comfort. From
these conditions originates the active predisposing cause of
pneumonia, to which we have already alluded.

The disease is more fatal in the very young and in the aged; the
mortality seems to bear a direct ratio to the respiratory capacity; in
young subjects the breathing powers have not been fully developed like
the other physical capacities, while in the old the respiratory volume
has been diminished by the stiffening of the chest walls and of the
lungs by the senile changes already detailed.

There can be no question but that protection from cold and judicious
attention to the health generally, by suitable exercise and diet, has
a powerful tendency to prevent that overloaded condition of the blood
to which I believe acute pneumonia to be chiefly due; still I have no
doubt but that the most active preventive measure that can be adopted
is keeping up the respiratory capacity to the full requirements of the
system, a precaution which is specially necessary to ease-loving and
high-living gentlemen who are past the prime of life. I am of the
opinion that if such persons would cultivate their breathing powers by
the simple means here recommended, their liability to pneumonia would
be notably reduced.


THE TRUE FIRST STAGE OF CONSUMPTION.

The progress of tubercular consumption has been divided by pathologists