Transcript from original newspaper article. However, a fuller version of this article can be found part way down in the chapter entitled `Conditions of Health’ in `The Practical Magnetic Healer’ by Professor G. M. Brown, 1899.

Pure Air to Sleep In

The recent investigation of circumstances affecting the health of the masses, have caused the importance of pure air and light to be more generally understood now than it was before. The simple fact set forth by Dr. Arnott long ago, that a canary bird suspended near the top of a curtained bedstead in which people are sleeping will generally be found dead in the morning, should have been sufficient to show the danger of breathing a vitiated medium, and the necessity for providing a constant and ample supply of fresh air in our dwellings. Impure air, however, cannot be seen; its effects are not immediate; and so it has been allowed quietly to kill its thousands annually, and to lay the seeds of disease in other thousands ready to be developed by assisting circumstances, without an effort to stay its ravages, and almost without a knowledge of its agency. A healthy man respires about twenty times in a minute, and inhales in that period about 700 cubic inches of air. Fresh air contains twenty-three per sent. of oxygen, and one and a half per sent. of carbonic acid: by the process of respiration the oxygen is reduced to eleven per cent., and the carbonic acid is increased to rather more than eight per cent. Three and a half per cent. of this gas render air unfit to support life; so that a man respiring 700 cubic inches in a minute, vitiates about 1630 cubic inches (to say nothing of the effect produced by the exhalation from the skin); and this will serve to give some notion of the large quantity of air required for the healthful occupation of a building by a number of persons, and especially of sleeping rooms.