Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/164

152 on terra firma in warm nights, and frogs continue their serenades till the morning wind chills them into silence and somnolence. The drowsy heat of the afternoon invites to slumber as the cool hours before the noon of night invite to music, reverie, or sentimental conversation, and our midsummer-night dreams would be no worse for a moonlight ramble on the mountains or in the garden-suburbs of a large city.

But "the best of all things is water, after all," was Pindar's motto, and should be our motto in summer-time, in regard to pure cold water, externally applied. In the crowded cities of the Atlantic seaboard and the Lower Mississippi Valley, whose summer temperature equals that of southernmost Europe, the lot of the hard-working classes would be exceedingly improved by the institution of free public baths. The citizens of the Roman Empire regarded their thermæ and their balnea publica as the chief criterion of a civilized town; and it is strangely characteristic of the metaphysical and anti-natural tendency of our ethical system that not one of our wealthy philanthropists ever thought of promoting the welfare of his native city by an establishment which an enlightened community should value as a common necessity rather than as a luxurious privilege.

The baths of Caracalla, which furnished the means of physical purification to tens of thousands, were certainly as useful—practically and morally—as the Serapion or the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and one per cent, of the wealth that has been expended on churches, Sunday-schools, foreign missions, and other attempts to secure the post-mortem felicity of the masses, would suffice to make their terrestrial existence far more endurable.



HE considerations stated in the previous article (see November ) lead up to the final subject—Punishment; in administering which the practice of education, as well as of other kinds of government, has greatly improved. The general principles of punishment have been already renounced. We have to consider their application to the school. But first a few words on the employment of reward.

—All these names point to the same fact and the same motive—the desire of surpassing others, of gaining distinction; a motive that has already been weighed. It is the most powerful known stimulant to intellectual application; and,