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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: We have plate-glass instead of lattices; and we have replaced the
draughty and smoky, but really wholesome open chimney, with its
wide corners and settles, by narrow registers, and even by stoves.
We have done all we can, in fact, to seal ourselves up
hermetically from the outer air, and to breath our own breaths
over and over again; and we pay the penalty of it in a thousand
ways unknown to our ancestors, through whose rooms all the winds
of heaven whistled, and who were glad enough to shelter themselves
from draughts in the sitting-room by the high screen round the
fire, and in the sleeping-room by the thick curtains of the four-
post bedstead, which is now rapidly disappearing before a higher
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