Now, since smoke diminishes the sunlight, reduces or suppresses the heat giving infra-red and the tonic ultra-violet rays, and diminishes the electrical potential (at least during certain states of the atmosphere); since smoke increases humidity, both during cold and warm weather, but particularly during cold states; and since it also increases fogs, and since fogs and humidity tend to increase the poisonous, bactericidal and solid contents of the air and to decrease the electrical potential and the heat light rays; it is evident that smoke must exert an important influence on human health, happiness and efficiency, and that the smoke nuisance must be regarded as a problem of very vital concern to any community that would conserve the vital efficiency of its citizenship. The assumption that smoke is an immediate, indirect conditioning factor in human behavior, because of its sinister influence on weather states (aside from its intrinsically pernicious qualities), is at least suggested by the only comprehensive study extant of the relation of weather to abnormal behavior: viz., Dexter’s investigation of the influences of various weather states on the conduct of a large number of child and adult offenders in Denver and New York City (5). The data which he studied included records of misdemeanors in schools, penitentiaries, and hospitals for the insane, arrests for assault and battery, for suicide and murder, records of deaths and bank errors, and strength tests. From this study Dexter arrives at the conclusion that days with high temperature and high humidity are unfavorable to metabolism. More specifically: anabolism is favored by high temperatures (though high temperatures deplete the vital reserve), high winds (because of better ventilation), and fair days with low humidity; while katabolism is increased by low temperatures, high humidities, high barometric pressures, rainy and cloudy days, and calms. (During fogs there is usually a condition of calm and a fall of temperature.) The katabolic weather states tend to deplete vitality, lower the vital reserve and augment the death rate, while the anabolic states tend to stimulate, invigorate, irritate and increase the nervous tension. Conformably with this classification of weather states Dexter finds statistically that anabolic conditions increase all the data which are of the nature of offenses.