The body effects part of its breathing through the pores. Painting a man all over with yellow ochre and copal varnish would kill him as surely as hanging him by the neck. The confined air between the sleeper's body and a stratum of heavy blankets gets gradually surcharged with carbonic acid—in warm weather even to the verge of the saturation-point. The perspiration is thus forced back upon the body; and the lungs—perhaps already weakened by disease—have to do double work.
"Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich's sein."
says Goethe's "Faust," in his mountain retreat, and a prejudice-defying friend of mine makes no scruple of arising from the pallet of his summer-camps and roaming the moonlit woods in the costume of Adam, drinking in oxygen through every pore, and wondering if the longevity of the ancients had not something to do with the fact that they could enjoy air-baths of that sort all summer, and not in moonlight only.
