Science in Short ChaptersWilliams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
Science in Short Chapters
Williams, W. Mattieu (William Mattieu)
Science
I thus expound my own scheme, not because I believe it to be perfect,
but, on the contrary, as a suggestive project to be practically amended
and adapted by others better able than myself to carry out the details.
The feature that I think is novel and important is that of consciously
and avowedly applying to domestic ventilation the principles that have
been so successfully carried out in the far more difficult problem of
subterranean ventilation.
The dishonesty of the majority of the modern builders of suburban
“villa residences” is favorable to this and other similar radical
household reforms, as thousands of these wretched tenements must sooner
or later be pulled down, or will all come down together without any
pulling the next time we experience one of those earthquake tremors
which visit England about once in a century.
HOME GARDENS FOR SMOKY TOWNS.
The poetical philanthropists of the shepherd and shepherdess school,
if any still remain, may find abundant material for their doleful
denunciations of modern civilization on journeying among the house-tops
by any of our over-ground metropolitan and suburban railways, and
contemplating therefrom the panorama presented by a rapid succession of
London back yards. The sandy Sahara, and the saline deserts of Central
Asia, are bright and breezy, rural and cheerful, compared with these
foul, soot-smeared, lumber-strewn areas of desolation.
The object of this paper is to propose a remedy for these metropolitan
measle-spots, by converting them into gardens that shall afford both
pleasure and profit to all concerned.
A very obvious mode of doing this would be to cover them with glass,
and thus convert them into winter gardens or conservatories. The cost
of this at once places it beyond practical reach; but even if the cost
were disregarded, as it might be in some instances, such covering in
would not be permissible on sanitary grounds; for, doleful and dreary
as they are, the back yards of London perform one very important
and necessary function; they act as ventilation-shafts between the
house-backs of the more densely populated neighborhoods.
At one time I thought of proposing the establishment of horticultural
home missions for promoting the dissemination of flower-pot shrubs in
the metropolis, and of showing how much the atmosphere of London would
be improved if every London family had one little sweetbriar bush,
a lavender plant, or a hardy heliotrope to each of its members; so
that a couple of million of such ozone generators should breathe their
sweetness into the dank and dead atmosphere of the denser central
regions of London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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