as open windows and doors.

Others think a hole of any size or in any part of the wall quite sufficient, while, I believe, the majority pooh-pooh the whole question.

It then becomes the duty of scientific men, and bodies, to educate the public up to the recognition of the fact, that ventilation is every whit as important as drainage, to individual houses, and that man can no more live in a foul atmosphere than he can while constantly imbibing poisonous

water.

Ventilation is a want arising chiefly from modern ways and customs, and is therefore a comparatively new branch of science, and we owe our present knowledge of the subject especially to modern researches and discoveries.

That ventilation is a new requirement will, I think, be readily acknowledged, when we consider the every-day life of our forefathers who lived prior to the close of say the 17th century. We shall see that, in by far the larger number of cases, theirs was an out-of-door life. Their days spent mostly in the field, either in the sports of

the chase, in war, or in the occupation of husbandry.

If they were wealthy, their halls were large and lofty with enormous fireplaces, and loosely fitting doors and windows, from which innumerable currents of air rushed to the fires. If they were poor, they had, amid all the dirt and wretchedness which surrounded them, no want of air, as any one who has seen an old English or Welsh Cottage will readily admit.

The windows, too, down to nearly the period I have named, were, in most cases, filled with nothing better than shutters or louvre boards, glazing being then a rarity, at least in houses of the commoner sort, for though glass was known to the Phoenicians and to the later Egyptians, whose glass works at Sidon and Alexandria were famous throughout the then civilized world, and although it was employed by the Romans to some extent in their windows, as is shown by the remains found in Herculaneum, window glass was not manufactured in England, I believe, prior to the middle of the 16th century and must up to

that time at least, and probably long after, have been an article of luxury, while its sub-. stitutes, oiled paper or plates of horn, can hardly have been in general use, at least in the dwellings of the poorer classes in country districts.

In cities and towns, doubtless, greater comfort, if not better sanitary arrangements, prevailed. But these were always the strongholds of fever, plague, and cholera. In towns the "black death," so much dreaded in the 14th century, had its headquarters, and from them it extended its devastating arms into all the surrounding country. I believe that to defective ventilation not less than to bad drainage and insufficient water supply, may be traced these scourges of the human race which now seem rapidly giving up their strongholds to the invading forces of science.

We cannot wonder on looking at such places as the hall of Bodiam Castle, for instance, in which were two fireplaces, each about 25 ft. wide and 7 ft. high, that people found a settle, a comfortable article of domestic furniture, and viewed the chimney

corner, where they crowded like smoked hams, as the choicest parts of the room. Nor must we be surprised when we are told that the curtains enclosing the couches whereon reposed the proudest beauties of the land shook in response to every wind that blew.

If the wretched hole which they show in Carnarvon Castle as the birthplace of Edward II. be indeed the room in which that unhappy prince first saw the light, I can only say that whatever advantages the men of a former age may have had over us, certainly domestic comfort could not be said to be one of them.

The first person who seems to have turned his serious attention with any practical result towards the subject of this paper, at least in England, was, I belleve, Dr. Desaguliers, who, in 1723, was called in to ventilate the House of Commons, upon which Wren had before tried his hand.

The Doctor discharged his commission with success, but he unfortunately provoked the hostility of one very important individual, viz., the housekeeper, a certain

This

Mrs. Smith, who effectually extinguished him by not lighting the fires upon the action of which his system depended, until the House had sat for some time, and the chamber had got thoroughly heated, so that we cannot wonder some of the members should have considered the design of cooling the House was frustrated, and requested the Doctor to employ other means. He accordingly invented a centrifugal wheel, or blowing machine, so constructed as to force air either into or out of the House, according as either was required. machine was put in charge of a man called the ventilator, whose duty it was to wait upon Mr. Speaker every day for orders. Dr. Desaguliers was next applied to by the the Admiralty to ventilate ships, but here, as might be expected, he got inventors' allowance, viz., more kicks than halfpence. All his troubles with Mrs. Smith were nothing compared with the treatment he and his invention received from Sir Jacob Ackworth, the Surveyor to the Navy, who seems to have been the beau ideal of an official. When the Doctor attended by appointment