has built for her labourers round Windsor.  Over each door a sheet of perforated zinc, some eighteen inches square, is fixed; allowing the foul air to escape into the passage; and in the ceiling of the passage a similar sheet of zinc, allowing it to escape into the roof.  Fresh air, meanwhile, should be obtained from outside, by piercing the windows, or otherwise.  And here let me give one hint to all builders of houses: If possible, let bedroom windows open at the top as well as at the bottom.

Let me impress the necessity of using some such contrivances, not only on parents and educators, but on those who employ workpeople, and above all on those who employ young women in shops or in work-rooms.  What their condition may be in this city I know not; but most painful it has been to me in other places, when passing through warehouses or workrooms, to see the pale, sodden, and, as the French would say, “etiolated” countenances of the girls who were passing the greater part of the day in them; and painful, also, to breathe an atmosphere of which habit had, alas! made them unconscious, but which to one coming out of the open air was altogether noxious, and shocking also; for it was fostering the seeds of death, not only in the present but future generations.

Why should this be?  Everyone will agree that good ventilation is necessary in a hospital, because people cannot get well without fresh air.  Do they not see that by the same reasoning good ventilation is necessary everywhere, because people cannot remain well without fresh air?  Let me entreat those who employ women in workrooms, if they have no time to read through such books as Dr. Andrew Combe’s “Physiology applied to Health and Education,” and Madame de Wahl’s “Practical Hints on the Moral, Mental, and Physical Training of Girls,” to procure certain tracts published by Messrs. Jarrold, Paternoster Row, for the Ladies’ Sanitary Association; especially one which bears on this subject: “The Black-hole in our own Bedrooms;” Dr. Lankester’s “School Manual of Health;” or a manual on ventilation, published by the Metropolitan Working Classes Association for the Improvement of Public Health.