The Sun.
London, England, 1849-09-28 00:00:00

ITALY

A letter from Rome of the 17th inst. contradicts
the announcement of the arrival of M. do Corcelles
in that city. He had sent a courier to General Ros-
tolan, and the General had an interview with the
three Cardinals. The Papal Government con-
tinued to exclude from office all those who had
served under the Republic. Announcements of
an examination of medical men had been posted,
in which it is directed that none be admitted
who have lent their professional assistance to the
Lte Government. The promotions made by Generals
Durando, Ferarri, and Pepe, are declared to be void,
and 120 officers who had submitted to General
Oudinot are dismissed. A new coin of five bajocchi
(twopence) is about to be issued front the Mint. M.
Galli, Provisional Minister of Finance, had gone to
Portici, in order to lay before the Pope a financial
project for paying off the Treasury-bills, at the rate
of 300,000 scudi every three months, by the sale of
church property which is already m,irtgaged.
The folio wing correspondtmee passed between Gen.
Pepe" and the Municipal Council of Venice, previous
to the General's departure for Corfu :

" TkIE MUNICIPALITY OF VENICE T GENERAL PEPE.
" Venice, Aug. 25.
"Excellency,—Venice, which has seen ycu take part
in its privations and its sacrifices—Venice will always
regard you as a brother, as a friend. It will always
grateful both for your noble intentions, and for the
ardent sympathy with which you have wished to serve
her. You have assisted this city with that love which
is seldom felt but for one's own country; you have dis-
played a generosity which is unequalled. Venice will
ever retain the most lively and sincere gratitude. In
ono of those moments when the heart, sei-king an al-
leviation of tha sufferings which overwhelm it, feels
a necessity to pour out its sentiments, allow tho re-
presentatives of the citizens of Venice, the faithful in-
terpreters of the wishes of all the city to address to you
a testimony of their affection. and the expression of their
prayers for the happiness which you merit from so many
virtues. _ _

Tha Podeita, GIOVANNI CORBEL"
REPLY OF GENERAL PEPE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF

VENIC2.

" From my most tender youth an admirer of the heroic
deeds of Venice, I compared them with advantage with
those of Greece and of Rune. Wht-n, at a later period,
being at the head of an army, I witnessed the peril of
that illustrious eity, I hastened to cross the Po, to march
to its assistance, followed by those who sought for true
glory in defying the pains of exile. During the fifteen
mouths that I 11,.d the honour to defend the Logunes, I
found that the character of the Venetians had not
changed under the weght, of adverse fortune. It has
required all the forces of a great empire and a mass of
thundering artillery to reduce that illustrious capital,
and at test it only yielded from a want of am-
munition and frons famine. You honour rue with the
title of friend and kosher; I shall be both one and the
other, Venetians, S) long as my heart continues to beat.
" GITGLIELMO PEPE."
The municipality of Venice has also addressed a
letter of thanks to the Neapolitan officers and sol-
diers whd served under General Pepe in the defence
of the city, and where they supported with heroic
devotedness the greatest privations and a series of
daily increased perils.

VENTILATION OF DWELLING-
HOUSES VERSUS CHOLERA.
Dr. Neil Arnott has published the following re-
marks on this important subject:—" I assume that
most readers already understand, or will now learn,
that the air which we breathe, and which is used to
stuff air-pillows, consists of material elements as much
as the water which we drink or the food which we
eit—indeed, consists altogether of oxygen and nitro-
gen ; the first of which forms also seven eighths by
weight of the substance of water, and the other
nearly one-fifth by weight of the substance of flesh ;
and that there is surrounding our glebe to a depth of
about 50 miles, a light fluid ocean of such air called
the atmosphere, into which near the surface of the
earth certain impurities are always rising from the
functions of animal and vegetable life, and the de-
composition of substances in putrefaction, combus-
tion, &c., just as into the sea and great rivers,
some impurities are always entering from the
sewers—all which impurities, however, are quickly
so diluted or dissipated in the great masses as to
become absolutely imperceptible, and eventually by
the admirable processes of nature, are decomposed and
changed, so that the great oceans of air and water
retain ever their state of perfection. I assume further,
that most people know that fresh air for breathing is
the most immediately urgent of the essentials to life,
as proved by the icstant death of any one totally de-
privedb y t
lie os
lfoisst
e throughr
dc,,,th strangulation; nt go üblraetai ot
breathe
e over
dr
ofd menro"m omincgopre
again the same small quantity of air, as when lately
seventy-three passengers were suffocated in an Irish
steamboat, of which the hold was shut up for an hour
by closely covered hatches ' • end by the still slower
death, accompanied generally by some induced form
of chronic disease, of persons condemned to breathe
habitually impure air, like the dwellers in crowded
ill-ventilated rooms and foul neighbourhoods; and,
lastly, as proved by the fact that pestilence or infec-
tious diseases are engendered or propagated almost
only where impurities in the air are known to abound,
and particulary where the poison of the human
breath and other emanations from living
bodies are allowed to mingle in considerable
quantity—as instanced in the gaol and ship
fevers, which so lately as in the days of the
philanthropist Howard carried off a large proportion
of those who entered gaols and ships, and us instanced
in that fearful disease, which at the Black Assizes at
Oxford, in July, 157, spread from the prisoners to
the court, and within two days had killed the Judge,
the sheriff, several justices of the peace, most of the
jury, and a great mass of the audience, and which
afterwards spread among the people of the town. This
was a fever which did its work as quickly as the cho-
lera does now.
Assuming that these points are tolerably under-
stood, I shall proceed to show that from faults in the
construction and management of our houses many
persons
nearly°uslY doing, in regard to the
air as fishes would be doing in
regard
breathe, if instead of the pure
tb eyt
to
tbehreeua‘n ythcaeetii: ctii
element of the vast rivers or boundless sea streaming
past them, they shut themselves up in holes near the
shores filled with water defiled by their own bodies,
and from ()the* foul sources. And I shall have to
show that the spread of cholera in this country has
been much influenced by the gross oversights re-
ferred to.
All the valued reports and published opinions on
cholera go far to prove that in this climate at least
any foreign morbific agent or influence which pro-
duces it comes comparatively harmless to persons of
vigorous health, and to those who are living in fa-
vourable circumstances, but that if it find persons
with the vital powers much depressed or disturbed
from any cause, and even for a short time, as happens
from intemperance, from improper food or drink,
from great fatigue or anxiety, but above all from want
of fresh air, and consequently from breathing that
which is foul, it readily overcomes them. It would
seem as if the peculiar morbid agent could as little,
by itself, produce the fatal disease as one of the two
elements concerned in a common gas explosion. The
great unanimity among writers and speakers on the
subject in regarding foul atmosphere as the chief
vehicle or favourer, if not a chief' efficient cause, o!
the pestilence, is seen in the fact how familiar to the
common ear have lately become the words and
phrases " malaria, filth, crowded dwellings, crowded
neighbourhoods, close rooms, faulty sewers, drains,
and cesspools, or total want oithese, effluvia of grave-
yards," &c., all of which are merely so many names
for foul air, and for sources from which it may arise.
Singularly, however, little attention has yet been
given from authority to the chief source of poisonous
air and to means of ventilation by which all kinds of
foul air may certainly be removed.
A system of draining and cleansing, water-supply
and flushing for instance, to the obtainment of which
chiefly the Board of Health has hitherto devoted its
attention, can, however good, influence only that
quantity and kind of aerial impurity which arises
from retained solid or liquid filth within or about a
house, but it leaves absolutely untouched the other
and really
quantity, more important kind, which, in known
is never absent where men are breathing,
namely, the filth and poison of the human breath.
This latter kind evidently plays the most important
part in all cases of a crowd, and therefore such catas-
trophes as that of the Tooting school, with 1,100 chil-
dren, of whom nearly 300 were seized by cholera, of
the House of Refuge for the Destitute, and of the two
great crowded lunatic asylums here, where the disease
made similar havoc—for places so public as these, and
visited daily by numerous strangers, could not be
allowed to remain visibly impure with solid and liquid
filth, like the Rookery of Sr. Giles's, and other such
localities. Now, good ventilation, which, although
few persons comparatively are as yet aware of the
fact, is easily to be had, not only entirely dissipates
and renders absolutely inert the breath poison of in-
mates, however numerous, and even of fever patients,
but in doing this it necessarily, at the same time,
carries away at once all the first-named kinds of
poison, arising from bad drains, or want of drains,
and thus acts as a most important substitute for good
draining, until there be time to plan and safe oppor-
tunity to establish such. It is further to be noted
that it is chiefly when the poisons of drains, &c., is
caught and retained under cover, and is there mixed
with the breath, that 'it becomes very active, for
scavengers, nightmen, and gravediggers who work in
the open air, are not often assailed with disease ; and
in foul neighbourhoods, persons like butchers, who
live in open shops, or policemen, who walk generally
in the open streets, or in Paris the people who manu•
facture a great part of the town filth into portable
manure, suffer very little.
To illustrate the efficacy of ventilation or dilution
with fresh air in rendering quite harmless eny aerial
poison, I may adduce the explanation given in a
report of mine on fevers, furnished at the request of
the Poor Law Commissioners in 1840, and of the

fact that the malaria or infection of marsh fevers,
stitch as occur in the Pontine Marshes neer Rome,
and of all the deadly tropical fevers, affects persons
almost only in the night. Yet the malaria or poison
from decomposing organic matters which causes these
fevers is formed during the day under the influence
of the hot sun still more abundantly than during the
colder night ; but in the day the direct beams of the
sun warm the surface of the ea•th so intensely that
any air touching that surface is similarly heated, and
rises away like a fire balloon, carrying up with it, of
course, and much diluting, all poisonous malaria
formed there. During the night, on the contrary,
the surface of the earth no longer receiving
the sun's rays, soon radiates away its heat,
so that a thermometer lying on the grown' is found
to be several degrees colder than one hang-
ing in the air a few feet above. The poison formed
near the ground therefore at night, instead of being
heated and lifted, and quickly dissipated, as during
the day, is rendered cold and comparatively dense,
and lies on the earth a concentrated mass, which it
may be death to inspire.. Hence the value in such
situations of sleeping apartments near the top of a
house, or of apartments below, which shut out the
night air, and are large enough to contain a sufficient
supply of the purer day air for the persons using them
at night, and of mechanical means of taking down
pure air from above the house to be a supply during
the night. At a certain height above the surface of
the earth, the atmosphere being nearly of equal
purity all the earth over,
.a man rising in a balloon, or
obtaining air for his house from a certain elevation,
might be considered to have changed his country, any
peculiarity of the atmosphere below, owing to the great
dilution effected before it reached the height, becom-
ing absolutely insensible.
Now, in regard to the dilution of aerial poisons in
houses by ventilation, I have to explain, that every
chimney in a house is what is called a sucking or
drawing air pump, of a certain force, and can easily
be rendered a valuable ventilating-pump. A chimney
is a pump—first, by reason of the suction or approach
to a vacuum made at the open top of any tube across
which the wind blows directly ' • and, secondly, be-
cause the flue is usually occupied, even when there is
no fire, by air somewhat warmer than the external
air, and has therefore, even in a calm day, what is
called a chimney draught proportioned -to the ditThe
rence. In England, therefore, of old, when the chim-
ney breast was always made higher than the heads of
persons sitting or sleeping in rooms, a room with an
open chimney was tolerably well ventilated in the
lower part, where the inmates breathed. The modern
Cashion, however, of very low grates and low chim-
ney openings has changed the case completely, for such
openings can draw air only from the bottom of the
rooms, where generally the coolest, the last entered,
and therefore the purest air is found, while the hotter
air of the breath, of lights, of warm food, and often
of subterranean drains, &c., rises and stagnates near
the ceilings, and gradually corrupts there. Such
heated, impure air, no more tends downward again to
escape or dive under the ehimneypiece than oil in an
inverted bottle immersed in water will dive down
through the water to escape by the bottle's mouth;
and such a bottle or other vessel containing oil, and
so placed in water with its open mouth downwards,
even if left in a running stream, would retain the oil
for any length of time. IF, however, an opening be
made in a chimney flue through the wall near the
ceiling of the room, then will all the hot impure air
of the room as certainly pass away by that opening as
oil from the inverted bottle would instantly all escape
upwards through a small opening made near the
elevated bottom of the bottle. A top window-sash,
lowered a little, instead of serving, as many people
believe it does, like such an opening into the chimney
flue, becomes generally, in obedience to the chimney
draught, merely an inlet of cold air, which first falls
as a cascade to the floor, and then glides towards the
chimney, and gradually passes arvay by this, leaeirg
the hotter impure air of the room nearly uritouched.
For years past I have recommended the adoption
of such ventilating chimney openings as above de-
scribed, and I devised a balanced metallic valve, to
prevent, during the use of fires, the escape of smoke
to the room. The advantages of these openings and
valves were soon so manifest that the referees ap-
pointed under the Building Act aided a clause to
their Bill, allowing the introduction of the valves,
and directing how they were to be placed,- and they
are now in very extensive use. A good illustration
of the subject was afforded in St. James's parish,
where some quarters-are densely inhabited by the
families of Irish labourers. These localities formerly
sent an enormous number of sick to the neighbouring
dispensary. Mr. Toynbee, the able medical chief of
that dispensary, came to consult me respecting the
ventilation of such places, and on my recommenda-
tion had openings made in the chimney flues
of the rooms near the ceilings, by removing a
single brick, and placing there a piece of wire
gauze with a light curtain Wale hanging against
the inside, to prevent the issue of smoke in
gusty weather. 'ihe decided effect produced at once
on the feelings of the inmates was so remarkable that
there was an extensive demand for the new appliance,
and, as a consequence of its adoption, Mr. 'Toynbee
had soon to report, in evidence given before the
Health of Towns Commission, and in other published
documents, both an extraordinary reduction of the
number of sick applying for relief and of the severity
of diseases occurring. Wide experience elsewhere
has since obtained similar results. Most of the hos-
pitalsei chimney-valves
naend poor-housesvalvea; and
most
natsht
of
theeking noweddommiel m
a have these
andthese
h
others who have published of late on sanitary matters
have strongly commended them. Had the present
Board of Health possessed the power and deemed the
means expedient, the chimney openings might, as a
prevention of cholera, almost in one day, and at the
expense of about a shilling for a poor mar, 's room,
have been established over the whole kingdom.
Mr. Simpson, the registrar of deaths for St.
Giles's parish, an experienced practitioner, wnose
much,visvisit
a red
h el ant
se
e tno noni
ee latelyof
f the e thatro
y, he
registeruteo the death of an inmate from
cholera. Ile found five other persons living in
judgmentehaaud r btae etnn called I vled
the room, which was most close and offensive. Ile
advised the immediate removal of all to other lodg-
ings. A second died before the removal took place,
and soon after, in the poor• house and elsewhere, three
others died who had breathed the foul air of that room.
Mr. Simpson expressed to me his belief that if there
had been the opening described above into the chirn-
ner, near the ceiling, this horrid history would not
have been to tell. I believe so too, and I believe that
there have been in London lately very many similar
cases.

The chimney valves are part of a set of means de-
vised by me for ventilation under all circumstances.
My report on the ventilation of ships, sent at the re-
quest of the Board of Health, has boen published in
the boards late report on quarantine, a ith testimony
furnished to the Admiralty as to its utility in a con-
vict ship, with 500 prisoners. My obsavations on
the ventilation of hospitals is alsoin the hands of the
board, but not yet published. All the new means
have been freely offered to the public, but persons
desiring to use them should be careful to employ
competent makers.

A BRIEF CHAPTER on OLD MAIDS.
(From .Eliza Cook's Journal.)
The title of Old Maid, and the ridicule once at-
tached to the condition of elderly female sisterhood,
are rapidly passing away together. The world is
becoming enlightened upon many subjects. It no
longer tolerates old evils ; and amongst others the
idea that women, unless married, are useless and
neglected, querulous fault finding busybodies; this
idea is being swept away with other dust and rubbish
of the past, amid the general clearing for the " good
time coming."
In society where good taste prevails, we now sel-
dom hear the term of " old maid," the milder appella-
tion of " single woman " being substituted. 'rids is
as it should be ; for wherefore brand, by what has,
from association, become a ridiculous nickname, a
respectable class of females who are in no wise infe-
rior to their married sisters—nay, who are in many
cases a thousand times better ; for is not your old
maid often one who has had to deny the dearest im-
pulses of her nature, and to stifle all her natural
yearnings for a love and a home of her own, for the
sake of others, devoting her life a living sacrifice to
those who may be perhaps all the while unpercipient
of, ungrateful for, her burdens and her cares for
them ? Oh !if these women be happy, persist in
being happy, notwithstanding their renunciation of
self and the lingering prejudice against their condi-
tion, why rob them of the smallest portion of their
tranquillity by a silly jest or sneer ?
It is a pitiable fact that young women, especially in
the middle classes, often marry without love, without
even esteem, for him with whom they wed, solely for
the purpose of escaping the stigma attached by the
ignorant and unthinking to the state of old maiden-
hood. Are we far wrong in referring to this dread
of remaining unmarried, the numerous devices of
vanity, the flirting, and dressing, and visiting which
retard the growth of many a rational brain, and cause
the fathers of gay, expensive daughters,' to sigh over
their rapidly-diminishing means, and half regret the
day when they rashly took upon themselves the
cares, and risk, and burden of a family ? We know
we are not. When old maids shall be invariably
treated with the respect and consideration which are
their due—when the last joke at their expense shall
have vanished into the Lethe of forgotten absurdities—
then will husband•hunting be at its last gasp, and
n atrimony again be a sacred thing.
Old maids' pets have furnished occasion for many
a graceless sneer, for much bitterness and affected
disgust. And wherefore ? Surely. those to whom
circumstances,. or their own sense of right, have
denied the station of wife and mother, may expend a
portion of the stifled love throbbing w ,thin their
won anly hearts; and which, had they married, would
have formed an inexhaustible provision of tenderness

for some sweet infant, or may be, a whole rosy little
troop of boys and girls—surely they may at their
pleasure bestow this objectless affection upon a faith-
ful dig, intelligent parrot, or gentle, domestic cat.
Their friends are not bound to like these pets, nor
even to approve of them, but that is no- reason why
our single sisters should be ridiculed for loving objects,
which, though others way see nothing to admire in
them, touch their lone hearts, and are perhaps the
means of preserving in its living and purifying flow
the well of sweet waters therein. And which in
reality is the worthier of disapprobation ; the woman
who in the absence of all legitimate. outlets of her
overflowing 'affection, fondles and carefully tends a
favourite dog ; or, the man who neglects the wife of
his youth, and seeks the convivial revel, wasting his
substance uppri the smoke of cigars, the fumes of
wine, and the selfish indulgences of masculine dissi-
pation?.. . _ _

No ! " old maids" are neither to be pitied or de-
spised. Of this we are in a position to speak, for we
hare the pleasure of knowing several excellent speci-
mens of the class ; and we can assure our readers
that many
.an idle, pleasure-loving matron might
benefit by their example. Active, cultivated, ener-
getic, judicious, widely-benevolent, their t-cant home-
ties leave them at liberty to • diffuse their words of
wisdom, and their deeds of kindness and of mercy,
around a larger circle than can be undertaken by the
strictly domestic woman ; and in the constant exer-
cise of their faculties, and their untiring devotion to
the interests of their fellow-beings, they experience a
solid happiness which surely is equal to any that this
changeful state of being can afford ; and we empha-
tically aver, that we have often obaervel the noblest
and widest benevolence of conduct in the abused state
of " Old Maidism."