Alexandria Gazette

RE-BREATHED AIR.—The crowded, badly-ventilated school-room is often the place where, early in life, re-breathed air commences its deadly work. Not one school-room in a hundred in this country is a fit place in which to confine children six or eight hours of the day. The little ones are herded together in a promiscuous crowd: those of tender years and those more advanced, the feeble and the strong, the sickly and the well, are all subjected to the same hours of study, the same school discipline, and all breathe the same deleterious air. The hardy and the strong may be able to resist the influence of the poison; the weak and tender ones grow pale and haggard, and struggling on through their school-days, live perhaps to the age of puberty, and then drop into the consumptive's grave. Will parents never awake to the enormity of this evil?

Small, ill-ventilated sleeping-rooms, in which re-breathed air is ever present, are nurseries of consumption. These are not found alone in cities and large towns, or among the poor and lowly. Well to-do farmers' daughters and sons in the country—those who live among the mountains of the New England States, where God's pure air is wholly undefiled—are often victims of consumption. How is this explained? Look into their bed-rooms; examine into their daily habits of life; and the cause is made plain. Old-fashioned fireplaces are boarded up; rubber window-strips and stoves have found their way into the most retired nooks and corners of the land; and the imprisoned mountain air in country dwellings is heated to a high point, and breathed over and over during the days and nights of the long winter months. It is certainly true that girls in the country take less exercise in the open air than those residing in cities. They appear to be more afraid of pure cold air than city girls. Consumption is not less rare among females in the country than in cities, in the present age. It was not so formerly. The declarations of grandmothers and old physicians go to show that, fifty years ago, consumption was hardly known in the rural districts. The winds whistled through the dwellings then; and the fire blazed and roared upon the hearth. Half the time, in the cold winters, the "backs of the inmates were freezing, while the front parts of the person were roasting;" and yet there was less rheumatism than now, and no consumption.—Exchange.