The Sun.
London, England, 1849-09-27 00:00:00

ITALY

A letter from Rome of the 17th inst. contradicts
the announcement of the arrival of M. de 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
late Government. The promotions made by Generals
Durando, Ferrrri, 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 from 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 mortgaged.
The following correspondence pased between Gen.
Pep 6 and the Municipal Council of Venice, previous
to the General's departure for Corfu :

" THE MUNICIPALITY OF VENICE TO GENERAL PEPE.
" Venice, Aug. 25.
"Excellency,—Venice, which has seen you take part
in its privations and its sacrifices—Venice will always
regard you as a brother, as a friend. It will be 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
one of these moments when the heart, seeking an al-
leviation of the sufferings which overwhelm it, feels
a necessity to pour out its sentiments, allow the 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.

" The Podesta, GIOVANNI CORREL"
REPLY OF GENERAL PEPE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF

VENICK.

" From my most tender youth an admirer of the heroic
deeds of Venice, I compared them with advantage with
those of Greece and of Rome. When, at a later period,
being at the head of an army, I witnessed the peril of
that illustrious city, 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
months that I had the honour to defend the Lagunes, I
found that the character of the Venetians had not
changed under the weight 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 last it only yielded from a want, of am-
munition and from famine. You honour me with the
title of friend and brother; I shall be both one and the
other, Venetians, so long as n2y,,haurGt
Lcioganou
I'
to

The municipality of Venice has also addressed a
letter of thanks to the Neapolitan officers and sol-
diers who 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 D WELLING.
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
eat—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 globe 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, arc 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 instant death of any one totally de-
prived of it through drowning or strangulation ; and
by the slower death of men compelled to breathe over
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 ; and 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 tLe gaol and ship
,evers, 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, 1577, 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 are unconsciously doing, in regard to the
air they breathe, nearly as fishes would be doing in
regard to the water they breathe, if instead of the pure
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 other 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 egent 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 ccmmon 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, of
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 of these, effluvia f 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 more important kind, which, in known
quantity, 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 St. 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 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
ive 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,t
r suffere tevtehrey
elinittetyi
of ventilation or dilution
with fresh air in rendering
quite harmless any 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