p. 61 | EFFECTS OF A SALUBRIOUS CLIMATE

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 17, 1869

EFFECTS OF A SALUBRIOUS CLIMATE.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

The following remarkable statement I find in Josephus, and confirmed by Pliny and others. It will give us a slight idea of the effects of a pure, salubrious atmosphere. Josephus is speaking of certain fruits, such as dates, pulse, &c., which were found in a fortress when it was taken by the Romans. He says: “These fruits were also fresh and fully ripe; and no way inferior to such fruits newly laid in, although they were a little short of a hundred years from the laying in of these provisions [by Herod,] till the place was taken by the Romans; nay, indeed, when the Romans got possession of those fruits that were left, they found them not corrupted all that while; nor should we be mistaken, if we suppose that the air was here the cause of their enduring so long, this fortress being so high, and so free from the mixture of all terrene and muddy particles of matter.” Whiston remarks on this that, “Pliny and others confirm this strange paradox, that provisions laid up against sieges will continue good for a hundred years, as Spanhiem notes upon this place.” —Wars of the Jews, Book 7, chap. 8, sec. 4. I believe there are places on our own continent where fresh meat hung up in the open air, even in the hottest weather, will not putrify, but will become dry and hard. Now when such an atmosphere, only far more pure and salubrious, shall pervade all places on the face of the new earth, we may readily see that there will be no decay, no putrefaction, no rottenness, and hence, no unwholesome odors in all that happy land. I want a home in such a land and such a climate as that.

D. M. CANRIGHT.