“The air here on this hillside is full of health and healing. Physical life you know is only possible in a right atmosphere. Add five parts more of carbonic acid gas and the body is poisoned--ceases to act--dies! Do you see the change in the constituent parts of the air? No--your senses are not aware of any change at all if the poison is introduced gradually; and so the use of the electric light in hotels has worked a great saving of life among the rural population, for the most frantic effort to blow it out proves futile; but in days gone by scarcely a month passed in any city when some innocent and ignorant individual did not lock the door, close the window, vitiate his physical atmosphere, and glide off slowly, surely, into that sleep which we call death. “In the carboniferous period there was no atmosphere capable of sustaining animal life. Vegetation was flowerless, and the trees grew rank in swamps filled with poisonous miasma, death and gloom. No flowers decked the earth or the tree tops, no fruit hung on the branches, the song of birds was not heard and the only animal life was made up of mollusks and the lower forms of animate existence. Gradually the carbon in the air was absorbed by the vegetation, and sank beneath the bending swale, and new trees grew, and others followed still, and these sank and sank again, carrying down into the depths the material that has formed the shining coal which warms and cheers our homes. “Gradually this purifying process continued; more and many kinds of plants sprang into being; these too absorbed the poison from the air, fit preparation that earth might receive her king. Animal life appeared in monster shape; fierce, awful forms, that crawled upon the land, through tangled swamps, or swam the sea, thriving in the atmosphere of slime--of gloom--of death. Gradually these nightmare forms have passed away, leaving only grim remains and foot-prints here and there, from which ingenious men have guessed the right proportion of the whole. Finer and finer, better and better grows the teeming life of animal and flower, until in words of prophet told, “‘Sweet is the breath of morn, Her rising sweet with song of earliest birds; Pleasant the sun, when first on this delightful morn He spreads his orient ray o’er herb, tree, fruit and flower, Glistening with dew. Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers, And sweet the coming on of grateful evening mild.’”