Health Hints.

Otago Witness, Issue 2373, 24 August 1899, Page 56

Health Hints.

It cannot be too clearly understood that the atmosphere is not pure enough for man's breathing until it has undergone the filtering and tempering process of the nasal passages. What the mouth and palate are to the stomach, such is the nose to the lungs, and the air which enters the nostrils differs from that which fills the lungs after having- passed through the nasal ducts much as pond or cistern water differs froru distilled. Yet people who in eafing will carefully avoid swallowing fish-bones, fruit stones, and nut shells, will allow their lungs for hours together to inhale the common air about them through the mouth, full as such air may be of impurities, disease germß, and me^hitie

gases; and although the construction of the nostrils is expressly adapted to arrest and purify or reject such impurities and germs. — "How Nature Cures ' It is not hard to understand that those who are sedentarily employed should eat much less that those who take a great deal of active exercise ; there is less waste to replenish in the former. , A wife once admitted that her working husband ate just as much in two days as she and four children consumed in seven. A labourer requires a good quantity of food, and he will remain healthy with it. The digestion is so much more vigorous when active exercise is regularly taken; a working man could eat large quantities of cheese or pork without feeling any the worse for it, while the same amount eaten by some city clerks would nearly kill them. Though exercise promotes good digestion and enables one to eat more food with impunity, it should not be taken too near a meal, or it will give the very opposite effect, especially if it be of a violent kind. — From "The Secret of Good Health." "It is incontestable," says Sir James Crichton Browne, "that old age is being slowly shortened, and that the present increased mortality at higher ages cannot be explained by diminished mortality at lower ones, even supposing increased delicacy in those who survive. "It is not satisfactory to find in our population an enormous increase of babies, children, and callow young men and women, without any proportionate increase in the number of ripe and experienced specimens of our race, of goodly matrons and tried veterans. t "While," continues Sir James, "increasing mortality from degenerative diseases diminishes our prospects of enjoying a ripe old age, the increasing prevalence ol minor degenerative changes enhances the probability that we shall be plunged into a premature old age, and become decrepit while still in what used to be considered the prime of life."