To determine the chronic toxicity of diesel exhaust, 2,150 F 344 rats were made to inhale various dilutions of exhaust under specific pathogen-free conditions for 16 hours a day, 6 days a week, for 30 months. Ten experimental groups, each with 120 male and 95 female 5 week-old rats, were set up and 14 males and 9 females were usually sacrificed for measurement of the 51 hematological and clinico-biochemical parameters at 7, 13, 19, and 25 months of age, respectively. These parameters were also examined in all surviving rats after 30 months of exhaust inhalation. In this experiment, no remarkable change in any of the parameters was observed in the periodic examinations. Therefore, tendencies of change in parameters were examined by comparing histograms for control and experimental groups. For the reference histograms, we used the values obtained from 144 males and 116 females aged 13-31 months. The first histogram was based on data from 1,352 rats, and the range from the minimum to the maximum value was divided into eight parts. When almost all the values were centered on a peak in the first histogram, this peak was divided into a further eight parts in the second histogram. Histogram evaluation clarified the differences between the control and experimental groups better than general statistical methods such as Student's t-test.