The blood is the carrier of life to the physical body and it is breath, not food, that keeps the blood flowing in our veins. It is breath not food, that purifies the blood streams and keeps new, fresh, red, oxygenated blood going the rounds of the human tide. The rise and fall of the body forms the suction power which sends it onward laden with its life giving force.
There is always a certain amount of residual air in the lungs whcih keeps them inflated and gives the individual a chance to call for more breath in emergencies, also a chance to let out more breath if the need is great.
The residual breath is often a source of disease and nearly always takes a part in the inharmony of the body. There are many who never really change the residual air in their lungs; this air remains like a stagnate pool over which the fresh air only passes in ineffectual ripples, while it creams over with the fetid, unexpelled carbon dioxide gas,–it becomes so completely saturated with gas that it is sometimes more gas than air and then we have the fetid breath, the coated tongue, the yellow biliousness, the “taste in the mouth” and all the things which have, in the past, been laid at the door of the intestinal tract but which really have their origin in the lungs.
The glutton, with his distended stomach full of food, does not take a normal breath–he can not; the drunkard cannot breathe enough for elimination, while the sick, puny invalid, to whom every effort is painful turns wearily away from the physical effort which enforced breath-
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