Unless the air were kept in motion by the heat of the sun, causing
breezes and winds, it would become stale and wouldn't do at all for
our lung-bellows to use. The air we breathe must be kept moving and
fresh if it is to make us feel bright and strong and happy. Mother
Nature has given us miles upon miles and oceans upon oceans of this
clear, fresh air to breathe--"all outdoors," in fact, as far as we can
see around us and for miles above our heads. She sends the winds to
move the air about and blow away the dust and dirt; and the sunshine,
you remember, not only to warm the air and keep it moving, but to burn
right through it and kill the poisons. But this brings us to something
else.
You have learned that the air we breathe out would soon smother us,
just as smoke would; and now we will see why. If you blow against the
window pane on a cold day, the glass is no longer clear; and when you
look at it closely, you see that it is covered with tiny drops of
water. This is part of the breath you have just blown out. If the room
is cold enough, you can see your breath in the air; that is, the steam
in your breath becomes cold and appears as tiny water-drops. You have
seen how in the same way, the steam, an inch or so from the spout of
the teakettle, cools, making little water-drops that float in the air
like clouds. Part of the breath, then, is water; but most of it is a
gas, and you can't see it at all as it floats away into the air about
you.
If your teacher has a glass of limewater, and will let you breathe
into it through a tube, you will see that your breath soon makes the
water look milky. This shows that the gas in your breath is not like
the air about you; because air was all over the top of the limewater,
yet did not change it at all. The milky look is caused by carbon
dioxid, one of the poisons in your breath.
When some people come close to you, you want to turn away your head,
because you do not like the smell of their breath. Even when one is
quite well, the breath has a queer "mousey" odor, so that we never
like to breathe the breath of another person. This disagreeable odor
comes not only from the lungs but from the teeth.
We are always breathing out poisons into the air. One of these you can
see in the milky limewater, and others you can smell when you happen
to come close to anyone else.
[Illustration: PROVING THAT THE BREATH IS NOT LIKE THE AIR]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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