Sleep, or, The hygiene of the night / by W.W. Hall.

  • William Whitty Hall
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sleep, or, The hygiene of the night / by W.W. Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    heart; and to stint ourselves for a third of our entire existence in the supply of agencies upon which these all-important characteristics de- pend, is “ unwise, unnatural, and degenerative.” Another illustration of this doctrine of chem- ical affinities is found in the experiments of Lewis, of London, in the examination of the ex- terior of twenty two thousand leaden coffins, and the contents of a large number in the church- vaults of the British metropolis, showing “ that nitrogen and carbonic acid gases, holding animal matter in suspension, unperceived, but steadily penetrate through, and escape from the pores of leaden coffins, and disappear in the air; so that by the end of fifty or one hundred years, noth- ing but dry bones remain ; and this escape may go on, though the coffins are uninjured. It is a rather ghastly thought that, of so many coffins breathing out their contents to mix with the air of the world overhead ; and the merry Lon- doners breathing in the sublimated remains of friends and progenitors, supposed all the while
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