The Evening Star. WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1872.

Evening Star, Issue 2870, 1 May 1872, Page 2

The Evening Star. WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1872.

Me Barton in a very amusing manner called attention to the bad ventilation of the Provincial Council Chambers yesterday. He said he observed last session that there was a gradual deterioration in the speeches and morals of the members as the session progressed, and he attributed this in great measure to their being doomed to breathe foul air during the many hours they were engaged discussing the questions brought before them. Honorable members laughed, as if they looked upon the matter as a joke. Most probably most of them did so regard it, instead of joining Mr Barton in his protest. We question much if any beside himself ever thought of it before. J-hey may have felt stifled and uncomfortable, and more inclined to make a bolt to the refreshment-room to relieve themselves of a sense of suffocation or to put off a head-ache, than to listen to argument j but it cannot have stiuck them that the martyrdom they were suffering arose from physical causes open to remedy, or they would not have endured it for a week. The Piovincial Council Hall may be looked upon as a suffocating box, in which if honorable members were doomed to sit en permanence) the term of their lives would be shortened in a ratio measurable by the length of time they spent in it. The room will only contain a ceitain number of cubic feet of air for the supply of forty-six honorable members, night and day, gas lights oy night, and the pxiblic who crowd the galleries. This is renewable only through the crevices of closed or occasionally opened doors and windows, without the possibility of the heated and carbonised portion of it escaping. There is no purification of it. Every breath a man druws makes tlis matter woisb every minnte increases its foul and poisonous qualities. The justly celebrated physician, the late Andrew Combe, on the subject of ventilation, says that a thousand persons in an hour and a-half require little short of four thousand hogsheads of pure air to oxygenate about fifteen hundred hogsheads of venous blood. His further remarks are so apropos to the subject, and must carry so much greater weight with them than any we could offer, that we make no apology for quoting them at length. He says - So wholly, however, have considerations of this description been without influence on the public mind, and so complete and allpervading has been the ignorance of physiology even among the best educated classes, that In Edinburgh, and almost every large town, we have instances of large public rooms, capable of bolding from 800 to 1000 persons, built within these last few years, without any means of adequate ventilation being provided, and apparently without the subject having ever cost the architect a thought I When these rooms are crowded and tb.e meeting lasts for some hours, especially if it be in winter, the consequences are sufficiently marked. Either such a multitude must be subjected to all the evils of a contaminated and unwholesome atmosphere, or they must be partially relieved by opening the windows and allowing a continued- stream of cold air to pour down upon the heated bodies of those who are near them, till the latter are thoroughly chilled, and perhaps, as in the cose of the soldiers in Sterling Castle, fatal illness is induced ; and unfortunately, even at such price, the relief is only partial > for the windows being all on one side of the room, and not extending much above half-way to the ceiling, complete ventilation is impracticable. This neglect is glaringly the result of ignorance, and could never have happened had cither the architects or their employers known the laws of the human constitution.