Dr. Tanner lived 40 days without food. This was a genuine fast, and very suggestive to physiologists. Griscom, of Chicago, fasted 45 days. Men can dispense with clothing, sunshine, water and food for some time, but not a day nor an hour without air.

The first thing we take into our systems at birth is air, and it is the last that leaves us at death. The vital, life-giving principle of the atmosphere is oxygen; and in the estimated 600,000,000 of delicate lung-cells the air imparts or gives up its oxygen to the blood, and receives in turn carbonic acid gas and moisture foul with the debris and the old, waste matter of the body.

Oxygen and ozone are food for men and animals, and carbonic acid, ammonia and nitrogen are food for plants and flowers. It is healthy to have plants in sleeping rooms.

This carbonic acid thrown off at every breath is heavier than the air, hence it sinks, and may be found near the surface of the floors in our dwellings, in cesspools, cellars, valleys and deep caverns. A chemist can fill a glass jar with this gas, and then pour it into another jar almost as readily as he would pour water.

Nature sometimes has to experiment for us. When in Naples, accompanied by Mr. Guppy and others, I visited that very curious cave called the Grotto del Cane. Men can walk safely into it; but dogs when they enter soon fall down and die, unless quickly removed. Some might at first infer that there was some substance in this cave poisonous to dogs, but not men. To disprove this, however, a man has only to lie down or bring his mouth within a foot of the floor to feel the signs of approaching suffocation.

At a young men's prayer meeting in London, where the janitor had kept the room shut all the week, several became seriously ill. They filled the room to its utmost capacity. After a time the lights burned dimly and the fire went out. One of the young men tried to kindle it, but failed. The meeting lagged. All felt stupid. One young man fell upon the floor in a fit. Two were taken quite sick, and others were indisposed; and all for the reason that they had exhausted the oxygen to the extent that it would not sustain the fire nor the lungs.

Carbonic acid is the result of combustion in some form. A single sperm candle will give off eight cubic feet of carbonic acid during a night; an ordinary lamp throws off as much of it as a man; a chandelier with several brilliant burners destroys as much oxygen in a room and gives off as much carbonic acid and spent force as three men. Therefore never keep a lamp or light of any kind burn-in the sick-room, or in your sleeping room at night.

Halls and churches should be better ventilated, and theaters, where hundreds and sometimes thousands crowd in - the gas-burners destroying the oxygen, the exhalations from the skin and the breath of the tobacco-mongers render the air absolutely poisonous. It is not fit to breathe. Multitudes are thus injured, receiving into their constitions the seeds of death.

The common candle that burns brightly at nine o'clock in the evening burns dimly along between one, two and three o'clock the same night. The oxygen has been consumed; it will not support the flame. The majority of the sick die between the hours of twelve at night and four o'clock in the morning. Give the sick and the dying, as well as the living, air - pure air!

Remember that the exhausted impure air in your sitting-room is near the floor, and the warm and and purer air above your heads, near the ceiling; therefore, to secure circulation and pure air, venti late at the bottom by the mop-board. This will permit the carbonic acid and the various exhalations to escape. Rooms high and capacious are conducive to health; the heated air is near the ceiling. Low beds, however fashionable, are an abomination. More people die of airtight apartments than cheap, unchinked log cabins in new countries.

In building a mansion or fitting up a common house for the family, put down one or more open fireplaces as among the chief blessings. Make it generous and old-fashioned for the burning of wood. How healthy and how social, too, for the family group to sit around it in the long winter evenings! If open wood fires are impossible, then use open coal grates.

The old-fashioned fireplace, with crevices under the door and along the base-boards was healthy, because the gaseous impurities, oxides, decaying vegetable exhalations and carbonic acid would pass off or be consumed with the fuel of the fireplace. Lowering the windows at the top to purify the air of a room is an exhibition of ignorance. It might let out some of the warm and purer air - that and nothing more!

Each individual requires full 2,000 gallons of pure air per day, weighing 25 pounds - requires three times as much by weight as he does of food and water combined.

The purest air, richest in oxygen and ozone, is found in forests and sun-kissed fields, and among the pines by the seaside, and up the sides of towering mountains.

During the Indian mutiny, 146 English prisoners were shut in an almost airtight room, called afterwards "The Black Hole of Calcutta." Into this room, scarcely large enough to hold them, the air could enter only by two small windows, and at the end of eight hours only 23 of the unfortunates were alive.

After the battle of Austerlitz 300 Russian prisoners were confined in a very badly ventilated underground room, where, within a few hours 260 of them smothered and perished.

During my voyage from Madras, India, where I had spent weeks visiting the leper hospitals, to Natal, South Africa, we were overtaken by a most terrific storm, and our stupid, half-intoxicated captain shut down the hatchways, and, further, fastened the cabin doors. He came near suffocating and murdering the whole of us.

The larger is not necessarily the stronger man. Measurements for armies and for the power of endurance show that the men best fitted for either are 5 feet 8 inches in height; weigh from 160 to 165 pounds; lift about 500 pounds, and breathe on the spirometer 340 to 360 cubic inches. The breath ing should be intercostal; the inspirations deep and full.

Each year we perform 7,000,000, acts of breathing, inhaling over 1,000,000 cubic feet of air, and purifying over 3,500 tons of blood. This breathing should be deep and the air exhilarating - all afire with oxygen and ozone! This ozone, so much spoken of, is a more condensed and active form of oxygen. It abounds upon high mountains, and may be generated by suspending a roll of phosphorous by a wire in a jar of water.

Smoking lamplights and stoves should be excluded from sick-rooms; and, further, the light not only consumes the oxygen that the patient needs, but it produces a tremulous motion in the atmosphere, preventing that quiet sleep and rest so indispensable to nervous and sensitive people.

Sleeping apartments should always be upon the south side of a residence. They need the sun. Pots of flowers and rose bushes under bedroom windows are as interesting as healthful. The beautiful pepper-tree of Athens, the eucalyptus of Australia, and the trailing evergreens of our own country, as well as hop-vines, sage beds and the various aromatic mints ward off malaria, develop ozone in the atmosphere, and conduce to health in our homes.

The reason that Indians and the Arabs of the desert seldom or never have headaches, dyspepsia, rheumatism or consumption is because they live mostly in the open air, and engage in a great deal of physical exercise. Outdoor exercise is healthful because people generally breathe deeper then, and, breathing deeper, they take more oxygen into their lungs, and as the oxygenated air breathed purifies the blood, the more deep outdoor breathing the purer and more vigorous the blood. "The blood," says the Bible, "is the life."

Most of the cheap talk about the dangers of the night air is as erroneous as absurd. Windows partly open or ajar should be the rule during the entire 24 hours; and this at all seasons. The night air is especially beneficial in cities and populous towns, because more free from dust, from smoke, and from street excrementitious exhalations.

Hunters, herders on the plains and soldiers upon battle-fields, though sleeping in open tents or upon beds of green boughs, seldom take cold. If living in a malarial district, shut the windows at sundown and build a little fire in the fire-place.

In coming out of a warm church or a crowded lecture-room, put a handkerchief or muffler over the mouth and breathe through the nostrils. Such breathing tempers and modifies the atmosphere.

Snoring is a disagreeable and unnecessary vice. It may be avoided by breathing through the nos trils and keeping the mouth shut. Many people would do well to keep their mouths shut more than they do. Great talkers are rarely deep thinkers.

It was long ago proven by the shepherds of Syria that large numbers of domestic animals did not thrive well when living and sleeping together; and it is both indelicate and unhealthy for several persons to sleep in the same room. The evils of re-breathing the same air cannot be too severely condemned, and for the reason that we take back into our bodies that which has just been exhaled.

Cold air may be just as impure as warm air. Some one-idea people insist in sleeping in a cold room, just as though there was some virtue in a room intensely cold. A sleeping-room should be of an agreeable temperature, large and well aired.

Attorneys pent up in small, ill-ventilated offices, where country clients spit tobacco-juice, clerks, merchants and ministers of the gospel - all who necessarily follow sedentary habits of life, should go off frequently among the mountains, climbing to their very summits. They should exercise in the gymnasium, ride spirited steeds, take early morning walks and drink in the rising sunbeams.

If feeble and nervous, keep away from the humid Savannas of the South; if inclined to consumption, better, in most cases, go to Newfoundland than to New Orleans.

The cooler and clearer the outdoor air is the better it is, generally speaking, for breathing, because more condensed - packed, as it were, more solid. In two cubic inches of air, equally pure, one at the equator and the other at the poles, the one at the poles has a much larger amount of oxygen - the great life giver and purifier of the blood.