Religio chemici : essays / by George Wilson.

Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Religio chemici : essays / by George Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    fans and nurses them till they ripen to death, and helps consumptions and fevers to sweep their thousands away. Its diffusive power is not more ready to intermingle the vital oxygen with the other elements of the air, than it is to carry the subtle poison of plague or cholera round the globe. But for it, miasms and malaria would confine their ravages to the spots where they originated, or at worst travel out- wards only by slow and warning steps, so that men might flee from them. But to the air they are as welcome as the choicest perfumes of flowers. It will take no refusal, but adds each to itself, and every living being is compelled to drain the poisoned draught. The air has its warm zephyrs and beneficent trade-winds, but it has also its monsoons and tornadoes, its whirlwinds and hurricanes, which depopulate whole islands and sweep the earth like besoms of destruction. It has its small rain for the tender grass ; its warm mantle of snow-down to lay over the young leaves till summer shall come; its refresh- ing dew for the sleeping flowers ; but it likewise holds in its right hand a flaming thunderbolt, with which it shatters navies to fragments, whilst it asks, in the name of God, ' Who can thunder with a voice like him ? ' How many millions of men have died of diseases of the lungs ! Whilst we have been rejoicing over the exquisite adaptation of the atmosphere to the necessities of animals, and to the respira- tory organs with which they are provided, hundreds of sufferers have been agonizing under the wasting pangs of consumption, not to mention other diseases. What is this ? The lungs of those invalids were made to breathe air, and air was provided for them. What, then, has altogether failed and utterly gone wrong ? The vital and sustaining oxygen is burning up the body, and maddening it with fever,—the bland and innocuous nitrogen is exciting fierce
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