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40
DUST ALLAYING APPLICATIONS TO SCHOOL
FLOORS.
The relationship between the cleanliness of the School-room
floor and the purity of the air in the room will be seen by the most
cursory observation to be very intimate.
Whoever has seen the sweeping of an ordinary floor, and has
observed the clouds of dust ejected by the broom into the atmosphere,
must have been impressed with the grossly insanitary, uncomfortables,
and even disgusting conditions with which the crude domestic
attempts at cleanliness are associated.
A school-room floor is not an ordinary floor; it is the floor of a
room which is intensely occupied during a very considerable period
of the waking life of a child.
It is in all its parts subject to excessive use. The constant
trampling of little feet keeps it in a state of continuous vibration, and
subject to innumerable minor waftings which raise its dust and
charge the atmosphere with all the varied ingredients which go to
the composition of school-room dust. In the newer schools, hard,
smooth wood block flooring has minimised materially the exaggeration
of these evils to which the older rough soft wood floor boarding
lent itself.
But to witness in one of our best constructed new schools, the
daily sweeping of a periodically washed good conditioned floor, is to
realise how far we are from the attainment of sanitary school
buildings.
There has been a very general recognition of the evils of floor
dust, and attempts to mitigate them by the use of chemical disinfectants,
deodorants, malodorants, and other misapplications have
been advocated extensively in the advertisement columns of the