Electro-physiology and electro-therapeutics : showing the best methods for the medical uses of electricity / By Alfred C. Garratt.

information of the public mind, and, if possible, to arouse the attention of the public authorities when it becomes more generally known. Already in Germany, and, I am informed, in Prance also, recent laws have been enacted prohibiting the hanging of arsenical and other poisonous wall papers ; and this perhaps may account for the cheapness of those beautiful but baneful French papers, of flock green, and velvet green with gold, that have of late flooded the American market. Is it to be wondered at, that a refined people should become more or less enfeebled, nervous, and scrofulous, and suffer much from deranged health, when the " home " itself, from very child- hood, is so contaminated with deleterious agents ? We get poison (though minutely, it is true, and perhaps but rarely) through the copper culinary utensils ; poisonous carbonic acid gas in prodigous volumes emanate from the gas-burner in the sleeping chamber, or from the multiple chandelier in the draw- ing room, and more frequently from both, and so pervades the halls and apartments of the whole house during all the night hours ; and too frequently the furnace is likewise leaking sul- phurous and hydrogen gas, (imperceptibly, perhaps, or even actually perceptibly by the senses,) thus saturating all articles and apartments, from dining room to attic, day and night ; and besides this, there is almost always a very disturbed electrical state of the warmed air, that pours in like a ceaseless river, but not a pure atmosphere, it having first passed over the surfaces of sundry hot irons in the " improved" hot-air chamber of the furnace, and so supplying the house with warmed air. Pan- dora's box ! — no, I will not compare, for Hesiod says Pandora closed the lid of that fatal box before Hope could escape ; but here we do still hope that these " improvements " and " com- forts " of our day will yet be corrected. We are not yet all dead who remember in childhood the pure whitewashed walls and clean floors, the large open fireplace with the winter even- ing's blazing fire, and tallow candles. Those rooms were light, and those families were healthy and happy. But to resume : It is, I believe, much owing to the elec- trical changes in the dry air of the apartment, that the im-