_ipse dixit_ of
somebody. Reasons there are none for using salted butter. Or, if any,
they are few, and frequently very flimsy and weak. Let us have hygiene
taught us, were it only that we may know for ourselves the right and
wrong of these matters.

FOOTNOTES:

[H] Since this was penned, the young woman has died of erysipelas. Can
it be that she has been compelled, in this form, to pay a fearful
penalty for her former abuses? One might think that twenty years of
reformation would have worn out the diseased tendencies. Perhaps she
recurred, in later years, unknown to the writer, to her former favorite
article.

CHAPTER LVII.

HOT HOUSES AND CONSUMPTION.

If any individual in the wide world needs to breathe the pure
atmospheric mixture of the Most High,--I mean a compound of gases,
consisting, essentially, of about twenty parts of oxygen and eighty of
nitrogen,--it is the consumptive person. Mr. Thackrah, a foreign writer
on health, says, "That though we are eating animals, we are breathing
animals much more; for we subsist more on air than we do on food and
drink."

And yet I know of no class of people, who, as a class, breathe other
mixtures, and all sorts of impurities, more than our consumptive people.
First, their employments are very apt to be sedentary. Under the
impression that their constitutions are not equal to the servitude of
out-of-door work, agricultural or mechanical, they are employed, more
generally, within doors. They are very often students; for they usually
have active, not to say brilliant minds. And persons who stay in the
house, whether for the sake of study or anything else, are exceedingly
apt to breathe more or less of impure air.

Secondly, it is thought by many that since consumptive people are
feeble, they ought to be kept very warm. Now I have no disposition to
defend the custom of going permanently chilly, in the case of any
individual, however strong and healthy he may be; for it is most
certainly, in the end, greatly debilitating. It would be worse than
idle--it would be wicked--for consumptive people to go about shivering,
day after day, since it would most rapidly and unequivocally accelerate
their destruction.

And yet, every degree of atmospheric heat, whether it is applied to the
internal surface of the lungs through the medium of atmospheric air, or
externally to the skin, is quite as injurious as habitual cold; and
this in two ways: First, it weakens the inter