Part 8

_Trades and Manufactures._—Let us next consider some trades and manufactures which have an injurious influence upon persons engaged in them, and to a certain extent upon the community at large. The injurious effects are owing to solid particles and offensive gases which are given out into the air. The result of inhaling air more or less charged with solid particles may be easily explained. When the latter reach the entrance to the windpipe they at once set up irritation in the delicate lining membrane, and nature tries to repel the intruders by the involuntary cough which results. Should this fit of coughing fail in doing so, a quantity of glairy fluid is poured out from small glands in the windpipe, and this fluid enveloping the solid particles tends to prevent them from doing further mischief. Should they, however find their way lower down into the air passages, nature has provided a very beautiful mechanism for their expulsion. The entire lining membrane of these passages is covered with innumerable minute hairs, or “cilia” as they are called, which, by constantly waving in an upward direction toward the mouth, tend to carry the solid particles, and the glairy secretion which they have provoked, away from the lungs, and so out of harm’s way. This wonderful provision of nature is sufficient for the purpose, provided the strain be not too prolonged; but when the supply of irritating particles is constant, or nearly so, the nerves and muscles involved in this mechanism become exhausted and cease to perform this process of expulsion. The irritating particles are now no longer removed from the delicate membrane of the air passages upon which they lodge, this membrane becomes inflamed, and bronchitis or asthma is the result. But this inflammation, at first only affecting the superficial membrane, may sink into the deeper tissues and affect the lung itself, in which case the original attack of bronchitis frequently merges into a condition of a consumptive nature. This will explain why many trades are injurious in which the danger to health is due to the fine dust floating continually in the air of the premises. For example, the particles of coal dust in the air of mines, and the smoke from factory chimneys; particles of steel and grit given off in grinding; organic dust or fluff in shoddy and flax mills; the dust in potteries, china works, pearl button manufactories, in polishing and cement works, in brass works, in marble and steel polishing works of various sorts, especially where emery is used; in all of these cases the solid particles are inhaled and tend to produce disease in the lungs and air passages. Moreover, the severity of the effects is chiefly dependent on the amount of dust, and on the physical conditions as to angularity, roughness or smoothness of the particles, rather than on the nature of the substance, except in some specific cases. The habitual inhalation of coal dust in the air of coal mines very frequently results in consumption, and the fine divisions of the lung become so blocked up by the particles of coal that the term “black lung” has been applied to the appearance presented by the lung after death. It has been found that the death rate from consumption among miners who work in mines where the air is changed rapidly, is very much less than among miners who work in mines that are badly ventilated. Of all unhealthy occupations that of steel-grinding is the most fatal. Steel-grinding is divided into the dry, wet, and mixed methods; and the injurious effects vary according to the amount of water used on the stone. Forks, needles, etc., are ground on the dry stone, and accordingly the men and boys employed at this kind of work are found to be the greatest sufferers. Dr. Hall, of Sheffield, has furnished important information as to the average duration of life among the artisans in steel, which he found to be as follows, viz.: dry grinders of forks, 29 years; razors, 31 years; scissors, 32 years; edge-tool and wool-shears, 32 years; spring-knives, 35 years; files, 35 years; saws, 38 years; sickles, 38 years. In this and many other similarly injurious trades various methods have from time to time been devised, more especially of late years, whereby the dust might be prevented from entering the air-passages, such as fans for blowing it away, and respirators of various kinds to filter the air as it is being breathed; but it has been found that workmen themselves frequently object to any innovation which appears to them to interfere with their more immediate comfort. There are some trades where the dust given off acts not only as a mechanical irritant when breathed, but where the substance thus inhaled acts as a direct poison. For instance, manufacturers of white lead and other mineral paints frequently exhibit symptoms of poisoning in this way, and workmen who use arsenical compounds, as in the making of wall papers, artificial flowers, etc., are often the victims of poisoning by arsenic. This poisoning by means of arsenical wall papers deserves more than a passing notice, owing to the dangerous and even fatal effects which they induce, not only in the workmen who prepare them, but also in persons inhabiting apartments where the walls are covered by them. These wall papers are mostly of a beautiful green color, the latter being due to a paint composed of arsenic and copper. Owing to variations of heat and moisture the green particles are constantly being set free from the paper and carried about the room by ventilation. Some idea of the amount of poison with which so many people are surrounded in their rooms may be formed if we consider that this green pigment contains fifty-nine per cent of arsenic, and that a square foot of one of these wall papers contains on an average more than sufficient arsenic to poison twelve persons. In addition to the cases which most physicians are now so familiar with, where dangerous symptoms of poisoning have been traced to this cause, it is much to be feared that insidious and chronic disease is too often due to this practice of covering the walls of our sitting-rooms, and more especially our bedrooms, with arsenic. It may be remembered, however, that a wall paper may be green and yet not contain any arsenic, so that the following simple method of detecting an arsenical paper may be useful. If a camel-hair brush be dipped in an ordinary solution of ammonia, and applied to the green portions of the suspected paper, the green will be rapidly changed to an azure blue color if arsenic be present. Some such simple test is all the more important, because green papers, “warranted free from arsenic,” have been found to contain a large percentage of that poison.

In addition to the sources of pollution of the atmosphere which we have been considering, there are various trades and manufactures in which poisonous matters are given off. Some of these are of an organic nature, as in the melting of fats, in the making of size and glue, in the boiling of oil, in the boiling of bones, and in many other processes carried out on a considerable scale, where the emanations are highly offensive and often of unknown chemical composition. Gas works must be included in this poisonous group, owing to the accidental escape of gas, sometimes in large quantity. In lime kilns enormous volumes of carbonic acid gas are poured out, both from the limestone burnt and from the fuel employed, and in this way persons living in the immediate neighborhood have been suffocated. In chloride of lime (bleaching powder) manufactories, and in places where it is used for bleaching wool and other materials, chlorine gas is given off into the air, causing when inhaled a great amount of irritation in the air passages. Moreover, this chlorine vapor is often carried in the air for long distances. In other branches of industry the workers are exposed to the vapors of sulphurous acid and muriatic acid, both of these being very irritating, and giving rise to various diseases of the lungs and eyes.

Such, then, are a few of the impurities, more or less poisonous, to be met with in the air we breathe; and dangerous to health as all of them are, it must be admitted that they do far less mischief to the public health than the continual mismanagement of our atmospheric food, common in all classes of society, by which it is rendered unfit to support a healthy life. The two ways in which air may be rendered thus comparatively valueless are either by excluding it too much from our dwellings, and this is the fault of the rich, or by crowding too many people together in small rooms, and this is the fault of the poor. In the houses of the better classes the air is kept out by closed windows, doors, curtains, and even in some places by putting screens before the fire-places in summer, and in bedrooms in winter when fire is not used.

Pure air is, in fact, the most important of all health factors. When it is breathed freely, plentifully, and continually, there are few diseases which it will not enable the body to resist. Nay, even some injuries, which, received by the denizens of the overcrowded city, would be speedily followed by death, will be readily recovered from by the agricultural laborer or country farmer, who, always breathing a pure atmosphere, has thus stored up a great amount of additional constitutional force.—_Good Words._

MANNER.

By LORD CHESTERFIELD to his Son.

I fear and suspect, that you have taken it into your head in most cases, that the matter is all, and the manner little or nothing. If you have, undeceive yourself, and be convinced that, in everything, the manner is full as important as the matter. If you speak the sense of an angel in bad words and with a disagreeable utterance, nobody will hear you twice, who can help it. If you write epistles as well as Cicero, but in a very bad hand, and very ill-spelled, whoever receives will laugh at them; and if you had the figure of Adonis, with an awkward air and motions, it will disgust, instead of pleasing. Study manner, therefore, in everything, if you would be anything.

UNPREPOSSESSING MANNERS.

This epigram in Martial,

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare; Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te;

has puzzled a great many people, who can not conceive how it is possible to love any body, and yet not know the reason why. I think I conceive Martial’s meaning very clearly, though the nature of the epigram, which is to be short, would not allow him to explain it more fully; and I take it to be this: O Sabidis, you are a very worthy, deserving man; you have a thousand good qualities, you have a great deal of learning; I esteem, I respect, but for the soul of me I can not love you, though I can not particularly say why. You are not _amiable_; you have not those engaging manners, those pleasing attentions, those graces, and that address, which are absolutely necessary to please, though impossible to define. I can not say it is this or that particular thing that hinders me from loving you; it is the whole together; and upon the whole you are not agreeable.

How often have I, in the course of my life, found myself in this situation, with regard to many of my acquaintance, whom I have honored and respected, without being able to love. I did not know why, because, when one is young, one does not take the trouble, nor allow one’s self the time, to analyze one’s sentiments, and to trace them up to their source. But subsequent observation and reflections have taught me why. There is a man, whose moral character, deep learning, and superior parts, I acknowledge, admire, and respect; but whom it is so impossible for me to love, that I am almost in a fever whenever I am in his company. His figure (without being deformed) seems made to disgrace or ridicule the common structure of the human body. His legs and arms are never in the position which, according to the situation of the body, they ought to be in, but constantly employed in committing acts of hostility upon the graces. He throws any where, but down his throat, whatever he means to drink, and only mangles what he means to carve. Inattentive to all the regards of social life, he mistimes or misplaces everything. He disputes with heat, and indiscriminately, mindless of the rank, character, and situation of those with whom he disputes; absolutely ignorant of the several gradations of familiarity or respect, he is exactly the same to his superiors, his equals, and his inferiors; and therefore, by a necessary consequence, absurd to two of the three. Is it possible to love such a man? No. The utmost I can do for him is to consider him as a respectable Hottentot.

METHOD.

Despatch is the soul of business; and nothing contributes more to despatch than method. Lay down a method for everything, and stick to it inviolably, as far as unexpected incidents may allow. Fix one certain hour and day in the week for your accounts, and keep them together in their proper order; by which means they will require little time, and you can never be much cheated. Whatever letters and papers you keep, docket and tie them up in their respective classes, so that you may instantly have recourse to any one. Lay down a method also for your reading, for which you allot a certain share of your mornings; let it be in a consistent and consecutive course and not in that desultory and immethodical manner, in which many people read scraps of different authors upon different subjects. Keep a useful and short common-place book of what you read, to help your memory only, and not for pedantic quotations. One method more I recommend to you, by which I have found great benefit, even in the most dissipated part of my life; that is, to rise early, and at the same hour every morning, how late soever you may have sat up the night before. This secures you an hour or two, at least, of reading or reflection, before the common interruptions of the morning begin; and it will save your constitution, by forcing you to go to bed early, at least one night in three.

You will say, it may be, as many young people would, that all this order and method is very troublesome, only fit for dull people, and a disagreeable restraint upon the noble spirit and fire of youth. I deny it; and assert, on the contrary, that it will procure you both more time and more taste for your pleasures; and so far from being troublesome to you, that, after you have pursued it a month, it would be troublesome to you to lay it aside. Business whets the appetite, and gives a taste to pleasures, as exercise does to food; and business can never be done without method; it raises the spirits for pleasures; and an assembly will much more sensibly affect a man who has employed, than a man who has lost, the preceding part of the day; nay, I will venture to say, that a fine lady will seem to have more charms to a man of study or business, than to a saunterer. The same listlessness runs through his whole conduct, and he is as insipid in his pleasures as inefficient in everything else.

ON THE KNEELING FIGURE IN MALVERN PRIORY.

By CHARLES GRINDROD.

[The old Renaissance figure (of a lady) is placed just outside the altar rail; looking northward, with one side of the face turned to the west, the other to the altar. Although kneeling, it has at a little distance the appearance of standing, owing to its peculiar erectness from the knees upward. The face is remarkable for the singular smile, half cynical, half spiritual (especially in the tightly compressed lips), which gives an expression of _living_ interest.]

Tenant of stone! here still thou worshippest, Smiling the prayer that on thy lips has hung While ages traveled. Still thou kneel’st among The quiet tombs. Impassioned joy or spleen Moves not thy face—in part to heaven addressed, In part to the green hills thy feet have clomb. Image of what is past, and what shall come! Silent as death, which thou embodiest Far more than life. Mute sentry! stood between The crumbled mortal and ascended sprite! Has thou no sense for what is, or has been? Can nothing break thy sepulchre of rest? Once thy heart throbbed with human motion keen, Thy folded hands with others warmly pressed, Thy close-sealed lips have sweetly spoke or sung— Now an eternity is not more dumb! The organ peels around thee its deep notes; But thou art deaf to music’s noblest strains. A glory of rich hues about thee floats; Thou car’st not for the splendor of bright panes. What fateful storms and changes hast thou seen! How little dost thou heed the mad world’s hum! Our childhood knew thee as doth now our age— Time stirs not thee. Where art thou all this space, The part of thee which not in stone remains, While wondering centuries roll past thy place? They change and cease: the whole world turns a page— But thou still wear’st that smile upon thy face.

COMETS.

By RICHARD A. PROCTOR.

During the last two years several comets—some telescopic, others visible to the naked eye, and even conspicuous objects in the heavens—have been observed, not only by the older methods, but by some which have only been available within recent years. It is naturally expected, therefore, by the general public that some new light should be thrown on these mysterious objects, whose phenomena still remain among the unexplained, seemingly the inexplicable problems of the celestial depths.

We propose to consider here what has thus been learned, and what also (unfortunately it is much more) remains still to be learned, respecting comets. But first it will be well to show what are the special phenomena which present themselves for explanation.

A comet apparently comes out from the remote depths of space in a condition of comparative calm. It appears as a small round nebulous object, looking like a tiny cloud of extreme tenuity—the idea of tenuity being suggested by the exceeding faintness of the comet’s light. This cloud appears somewhat condensed toward the middle. As the comet draws nearer to the sun, it usually grows somewhat long in the direction of the sun; and before long a portion within the part nearest the sun is seen to be brighter than the rest, and to have a more or less defined outline. This is the _nucleus_—sometimes seen as a dull disc of nearly uniform brightness, at others as a mere bright point not unlike a star. The fainter light around this is the _coma_, or hair, which resembles a luminous fog round the nucleus, usually brighter on the side toward the sun, and on the other side growing fainter and fainter till it can no longer be seen. Later this lengthening of the comet in directions toward and from the sun becomes more marked, until at length the comet may fairly be said to have a head directed toward the sun and a tail directed from him. Nucleus, coma, and tail may be very different in appearance in different comets, and in particular the tail may be more or less complicated in structure, being sometimes a mere straight streak, at others twofold, multiple, curved, with thwart streaks, and so forth—no two comets, in fine, having tails resembling each other except in general details.

Dr. Huggins, in a rather disappointing article on comets, recently communicated to a contemporary, remarks that the nucleus, though an apparently insignificant speck, “is truly the heart and kernel of the whole thing—potentially it is the comet.” This has scarcely yet been proved, though it appears exceedingly probable. It is true, however, as he adds, that this part only of the comet conforms rigorously to the laws of gravitation, and moves strictly in its orbit. “If we could see a great comet,” he proceeds, “during its distant wandering, when it has put off the gala trappings of perihelion excitement, it would appear as a very sober object, and consist of little more than nucleus alone.” This again seems probable, though it has never yet been proved, and the division of some comets into two or more parts, each having coma, nucleus, and tail of its own, shows that the nucleus cannot be, in every case, what Dr. Huggins seems here to suggest. Dr. Huggins has done well in saying (though scarcely with sufficient emphasis, considering how often the mistake is repeated) that “though many telescopic comets are of extremely small mass, nucleus included—so small, indeed, that they are unable to perturb such small bodies as Jupiter’s satellites—yet we should mistake greatly if we were to suppose that all comets are ‘airy nothings.’ In some large comets the nucleus may be a few hundred miles in diameter, or even very much larger, and may consist of solid matter. It is not necessary to say that the collision of a cometary nucleus of this order with the earth would produce destruction on a wide scale.”

It is even more necessary to correct the widely-spread misapprehension as to the relations between meteors and comets. We hear it stated that the nucleus of a comet is made up of meteoric stones (Professor P. G. Tait says—for unknown reasons—that they resemble “paving stones or even bricks”) as confidently as though the earth had at some time passed through the nucleus of a comet, and some of our streets were now paved with stones which had fallen to earth on such an occasion. As a matter of fact, all that has yet been proved is that meteoric bodies follow in the track (which is very different from the tail) of some known comets, and that probably all comets are followed by trains of meteors. These may have come out of the head or nucleus in some way as yet unexplained; but it is by no means certain that they have done so, and it is by many astronomers regarded as more than doubtful.

The most important points to be noticed in the behavior of large comets, as they approach the sun, is that usually the side of the coma which lies toward the sun is the scene of intense disturbance. Streams of luminous matter seem to rise continually toward the sun, attaining a certain distance from the head, when, assuming a cloud-like appearance, they seem to form an envelope around the nucleus. This envelope gradually increases its distance from the sun, growing fainter and larger, while within it the process is repeated, and a new envelope is formed. This in turn ascends from the nucleus, expanding as it does so, while within it a new envelope is formed. Meanwhile, the one first formed has grown fainter, perhaps has disappeared. But sometimes the process goes on so rapidly (a day or two sufficing for the formation of a complete new envelope) that several envelopes will be seen at the same time, the outermost faintest, the innermost most irregular in shape and most varied in brightness, while the envelope or envelopes between are the best developed and most regular.