This is especially deleterious in an age and country where active
brains are constantly drawing blood from the extremities to the head.
All furnace-heated rooms have coldest air at the feet, and warmest
around the head. It is also rarely the case that furnace-heated houses
have proper arrangements for carrying off the vitiated air.
There are some recent scientific discoveries that relate to impure air
which may properly be introduced here. It is shown by the microscope
that _fermentation_ is a process which generates extremely minute
plants, that gradually increase till the whole mass is pervaded by
this vegetation. The microscope also has revealed the fact that, in
certain diseases, these microscopic plants are generated in the blood
and other fluids of the body, in a mode similar to the ordinary process
of fermentation.
And, what is very curious, each of these peculiar diseases generates
diverse kinds of plants. Thus in the typhoid fever, the microscope
reveals in the fluids of the patient a plant that resembles in form
some kinds of seaweed. In chills and fever, the microscopic plant has
another form, and in small-pox still another.
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