g effect on the lungs. Indeed,
the body soon gets accustomed to the colder air, and those who practise
keeping open windows winter and summer find that they do not require
heavier clothing than those who sit with windows shut. A slight or even
considerable feeling of coldness, when due to cold air and not to
ill-health, will not harm.

This is no new idea. Dr. Henry McCormac, of Belfast, father of the
eminent surgeon, Sir William McCormac, wrote forty years ago:--"The
mainly unreasoning dread of night air, so termed, is a great impediment
to free ventilation by night. And yet day and night air is the same
virtually, does not differ appreciably. The air by night, whether damp
or dry, is equally pure, equally salubrious with the air by day, and
calls not less solicitously for ceaseless admission into our dwellings.
Air, ere it reaches the lungs, is always damp. Quite dry air is
irrespirable. It needs no peculiar or unusual habitude in order to
respire what is termed night air. Exposure to contact with the day air
equally prepares us for exposure to the contact with the night air. We
can multiply our coverings by night with even greater ease than we can
by day, and with the most perfect certainty of producing and obtaining
warmth. Good heavens! How is it that people are so wildly mistaken as
if the great wise Deity, as he does by every exquisite and perfect
adaption, did not intend that we should make use of the purest,
sweetest air day and night always? The prospective results of breathing
purest air by night are so infinitely desirable, the immediate
enjoyment is so great that it only needs a trial to be approved of and
adopted for ever.... Reasonable precautions--that is to say, adequate
night coverings--being resorted to, no colour of risk to the lungs,
even of the most delicate, can possibly ensue. For, it is stagnant air,
air pre-breathed only, and not pure unprerespired air that makes lungs
delicate. Although air, warmth, food, and cleanliness be cardinal
conditions and essential to life, still the most important of all
health factors is air--air pure and undefiled alike by day and by
night.... The constant uneasy dread of taking cold, which haunts the
minds of patients and their friends, is doubtless the one great reason
why fresh air is thrust aside. And yet cold will not be caught, were it
in Nova Zembla itself, by night, if only the sleeper's body be
adequately covered.... The pulses or puffs of air that comes i