') The recipe is an excellent one; pedestrians and teachers
of gymnastics all endorse it.
Rarefied Air, effects of.--On high plateaux or mountains new-comers must
expect to suffer. The symptoms are described by many South American
travellers; the attack of them is there, among other names, called the
puna. The disorder is sometimes fatal to stout plethoric people; oddly
enough, cats are unable to endure it: at villages 13,000 feet above the
sea, Dr. Tschudi says that they cannot live. Numerous trials have been
made with these unhappy feline barometers, and the creatures have been
found to die in frightful convulsions. The symptoms of the puna are
giddiness, dimness of sight and hearing, headache, fainting-fits, blood
from mouth, eyes, nose, lips, and a feeling like sea-sickness. Nothing
but time cures it. It begins to be felt severely at from 12,000 to 13,000
feet above the sea. M. Hermann Schlagintweit, who has had a great deal of
mountain experience in the Alps and in the Himalayas, up to the height of
20,000 feet or more, tells me that he found the headache, etc., come on
when there was a breeze, far more than at any other time. His whole party
would awake at the same moment, and begin to complain of the symptoms,
immediately on the commencement of a breeze. The symptoms of overwork are
not wholly unlike those of the puna, and many young travellers who have
felt the first, have ascribed them to the second.
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