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Still as the reader need hardly be reminded it was not sufficient to renew the exhausted oxygen; the complete purification of the air required the absorption of the carbonic acid, exhaled from the lungs. For nearly 12 hours the atmosphere had been gradually becoming more and more charged with this deleterious gas, produced from the combustion of the blood by the inspired oxygen.
How many thousands are victims to a slow suicide and murder, the chief instrument of which is want of ventilation! How few are aware of the fact that every person, every day, vitiates thirty-three hogsheads of the air, and that each inspiration takes one fifth of the oxygen, and returns as much carbonic acid, from every pair of lungs in a room!
Doctor Nott was crestfallen, but still unconvinced. "If my whole medical reputation were at stake," he repeated, "I should still be compelled to swear to asphyxia. I've seen it too often, to make a mistake. Carbonic oxide or not, Templeton and Miss Wainwright were asphyxiated." It was now Whitney's chance to air his theory.
One needs no better proof that carbonic acid is formed on the surface of the body, than the fact that after the body has been closely covered all night, if you introduce a candle under the bed-clothes into this confined air, it will be quickly extinguished, because there is too much carbonic acid gas there, and too little oxygen.
Land-animals as yet were not, for the excess of carbonic acid in the atmosphere rendered it incapable of supporting animal life.
The natural consequence of this prodigality of combustion is, that there must be, in proportion, much more oxygen in birds than in us; and that of all animals a bird is the one most quickly poisoned by his own carbonic acid when the air is not renewed around him.
The carbonic acid of the fire happily escapes up the chimney in the smoke: but the carbonic acid from the human beings and the candles remains to poison the room, unless it be ventilated. Now, I think you may understand one of the simplest, and yet most terrible, cases of want of ventilation death by the fumes of charcoal.
Here, however, we are dealing with UNINJURED FRUITS IN CONTACT WITH CARBONIC ACID GAS. Our theory, on the other hand, which, we may repeat, we have advocated since 1861, maintains that all cells become fermentative when their vital action is protracted in the absence of air, which are precisely the conditions that hold in the experiments on fruits immersed in carbonic acid gas.
In addition, it is necessary to measure the exact amount of material he eliminates in the form of carbonic acid and other excretions. Such experiments present many difficulties which have not yet been thoroughly overcome, but they have been attempted by several investigators.
It was evident that the crust of the earth was subjected in this part of the globe to a frightful pressure. The atmosphere was saturated with gases and carbonic acid, mingled with aqueous vapours.
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