either cause removed, many would be preserved who now perish. Without the dust, which they so frequently breathe, even their feeble lungs would continue sound; and persons of stronger chest would breathe the soft floating particles, of which this dust consists, with impunity. It is certain that the phthisical race of carpet-manufacturers, taylors, lace-weavers, and others employed in a like manner, must draw into the chest a considerable quantity of linen, woollen, silk, and cotton fibres; and why should not these occasionally produce upon their peculiarly susceptible and delicate mucous membrane, the effect which similar substances produce on such as breathe them more freely and more constantly?

'A Arras, les dentillieres, dont le metier exige qu'elles soient toujours courbees, se plaignent ordinairement de la poitrine et de l'estomac parce que ces parties essentielles se trouvent dans une gene continuelle. Ce metier est si pernicieux pour la santé de ce sexe delicat, qu'on voit la plupart des jeunes filles, arrivees a l'age de l'enjouement et des plaisirs, le passer sans gaiete, et perdre en peu de temps, la fraicheur de leur teint, l'eclat de leur coloris, et la vigueur de leur temperament; souvent etre attaquees d'une toux seche presque continuelle; se plaindre des douleurs sur le sternum et le long des cotes; etre vivement oppres sees, manquer d'appetit et tomber enfin dans la phthisie.

Ritz.

The opulent sufferers from consumption, and the artists who spend their day in warm, close rooms, free from floating particles of any sort, belong to one and the same class. All such artists are peculiarly subject to consumption. The confinement alone is sufficient to generate the propensity, as we find in shoemakers, without a particularly warm temperature. Confinement is sufficient to induce consumption in the ox kind, although by no means predisposed to the disorder. But with heat it acquires a double efficacy. Thus LEPECQ DE LA CLOTURE, a physician of Rouen, who has particularly attended to the paper-makers there, informs us that these artisans, (who begin to work about two in the morning,) have a flabby skin, a sallow complexion, and every appearance of feebleness. They are exceedingly liable to complaints of the chest, and very commonly die of pulmonary consumption. The atmosphere they breathe is constantly full of warm vapours. Mr. Carlisle, surgeon in London, in a letter to the author, relates of the gilders in that city, who work in heated rooms, and are often induced to expose themselves to damp and cold, that not less than six out of seven are said to die consumptive in their apprenticeship.

If we raise our view from the lower to the higher classes, we shall here perceive that it is upon the lilies of the land, that neither toil nor spin, that the blight of consumption principally falls. Were a table to be drawn out, exhibiting the result of an accurate and general enquiry, the females, who live without labour, would occupy a station, not exceedingly remote from the manufacturers, destroyed by breathing flint and steel *. I have very little doubt but they would come next to those, who have been described as suffering from gross and palpable irritants of the smoother and softer kind.

To understand the gradation of cases from the wretched needle-pointers to the pulmonic patients, whose apartments are filled by an atmosphere where scarce a moat is discernible in the sun-beams, it is necessary to

* A physician of Vienna considers the dust of the roads, as a cause of consumption. "This holds especially of "those great cities, which are surrounded by distant sub

urbs, to which unpaved roads lead. Working men are "often obliged to travel from the suburbs to the city once "or twice in a day. It is particularly bad when they

are forced by hurry to walk fast, or when they do so to

get sooner out of the cloud of dust. For by their deep

and frequent respiration, they must

"dust than in going gently."

inhale much more

remember that consumption may be induced in two different ways. The first is by the constant operation of violent causes, where there is no more predisposition than the structure of the organs concerned necessarily brings with it. The second is by the operation of slight causes, where there exists a strong predisposition. Here the habit compensates for the inferiority of power in the immediate agents. Nor does it seem essential that there should be received hard angular or sharp particles into the nostrils and air-pipes, in order to induce any common disease, of which the air-passages are susceptible. I am acquainted with a person, in whom a pinch of ordinary snuff will induce sneezing in the first place, as he is not an habitual snuff-taker, and afterwards a genuine catarrh. His first account of the phænomenon was, that a pinch of snuff always opened his head. His conception seemed to be that there was a reservoir of mucus somewhere above the nose, which the operation of snuff occasioned to be in part discharged. I did not comprehend the circumstance clearly, till after some explanation. But this is somewhat singular. There are acrid substances which will immediately cause violent sneezing in every person, and leave a catarrhal affec

tion behind in many. Nay, the oxygenated muriatic acid, which cannot be supposed to act by any angular points, will produce longcontinued sneezing, and in some individuals a perfect artificial catarrh. M. GuytonMorveau, on smelling to a phial of what he terms his extemporaneous oxygenated muriatic acid, was seized with " a sneezing, which held him constantly for several hours." (Moyens de desinfecter l'Air, p. 135.) In M. Vauquelin and others, the effects of this active gas were perfectly analogous to a common cold. There was the sneezing, with which the latter frequently begins; the same disagreeable feelings about the head, and afterwards a similar copious running of clear liquid from the nose. During this defluxion, two ounces of mucus have been discharged in half an hour*! The subsequent

* Un resserrément et une gêne insupportable dans les sinus frontales et dans ces arriere-fosses nasales; l'eternuement suit de pres cette premiere action; bientot il s'etablit un ecoulement d'une liqueur limpide comme un chrystal. Les eternuemens sont quelquefois si promptement repetés qu'une sueur abondante couvre tout le corps. -- M. Vauquelin craignoit l'hæmoptysie. Après que les symptômes les plus violens --- sont calmès, il reste encore pendant plusieurs heures un resserrement, une espece de roideur insupportable dans toutes les parties, qui ont ressenti l'ac