HOW TO CLEAN OUR SKIES [To the Editor - of the
SPECTATOR.] Sin,--No one like -thyself who has long profited by Mr. T. C. Hoisfall's teaching and who is well acquainted with his magnificent. record as an enlightened reformer of our housing can read his letter with anything but respect and appreciation-. In order to regain their heritage Of Sunlight, our children mast be rightly housed as well as given -snxikeless air and unsullied light: above them. • Your readers may remember my din. mission of "A Civic Lesson from Dundee," and certain. excellent two-storied buildings,- replacing slum tenements;
in that connexion. .
• But I am happy to say that Mr.- norsfall-s citation of evidence of rickets in Germany "many years -ago,7., as he himself dates it, is no longer applicable to our day. In 1910, in Berlin, Huklicilinsky found the value of artificial light against rickets, using a mercury vapthir quartz lamp. (Our own Dr. Palm had shown the power of real sunlight against the disease in 1390, but no one heeded him.) • Now the Germans have gone ahead. After a lecture on sunlight to the recent International Education Conference at Heidelberg, I Was informed:that; for instaince„iniBaden alone forty towns are now regularly giiritig sunbatlis and, failing them, artificial sunbaths: to their children. In Beinn eVery- baby gets a light bath within the first twenty-Ai:if hours of its birth. -Vhope this increases our -chances of getting rinbfher Beethoven; ziOw
Much *overdue: --Thanks -to preventionz
their systematic use of the sunlight thus safeguarded the Veiiiirins- are ceasing to prOduee the rickets `whieh; as ,Horsfall says, Were so common amongst them many Years
Royal Institution. - - • November 7th, 1925.
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