Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/162

150 appendage, and Nature seems to have taken especial care to protect the nape of the neck in a great number of different animals. It is certainly a suggestive circumstance that fomenting the space between the shoulders exerts an assuaging effect on various affections of the respiratory organs; and, if I had the care of a boy with an hereditary disposition to a pulmonary disease, I should feel strongly tempted to defy fashion, and let him wear his hair à la Guido—about a foot long.

The canal-laborers of Sault Ste. Marie wear double hoods, and on many days have to stuff them with wool to save their ears; but, in the more populous part of America, such days are a rare exception, and south of the lower lakes the average schoolboy will prefer to rough it with a tippet shawl or a common cap with a pair of ear-flaps. In regard to the utility of woolen underclothes, opinions are much divided: Carl Bock recommends worsted jackets; Dr. Coale flannel undershirts and drawers, with extra breast-pads in cold weather; but the hardy Scandinavians, Russians, and French Canadians, as well as the great majority of our German population, still stick to coarse linen next the skin, and use woolen pectorals only as counter-irritants in rheumatic affections. Persons who can not bear woolen underclothes, I would advise to try the Normandy plan of ruffled linen, which might be applied even to hoiseryhosiery [sic] and drawers. Chamois-leather, too, is as warm as wool and less irritating to the skin, and has the advantage of being more durable, and withal cleanlier, than the best flannel. On stormy days, especially during the piercing northwest storms of our prairie States, few children will object to a Scotch plaid, worn like a burnoose, over head and shoulders, or a handful of wool stuffed around the socks in a pair of wide brogans.

But at the beginning of the warm season all such things ought to be thrown aside. A loose shirt, linen jacket, and short linen trowsers are the right summer dress for a healthy boy—a dalmatica and light straw hat for a healthy girl—in a country where the six warmest months approach the isotherms of southern Spain. No wadded coats, no drawers, and, in the name of reason, no flannels, nor shoes and stockings, unless the mud is very deep, or the road to school recently macadamized. The long-lived races of Eastern Europe would laugh at the idea that the constitution of a normal human being could be endangered by an April shower, or that in the dog-days "health and decency" require a woolen cuticle from neck to foot. Have dogmas and hearsays entirely closed our senses to the language of instinct, to the meaning of the discomfort, the distracting uneasiness under the burden of a load of calorific covers and bandages, while every pore of our skin cries out for relief, for the cooling influence of the free open air? Keep your children under lock and key, lest the sun should spoil their complexion or their morals, let them pass their days in an underground dungeon like Kaspar Hauser, but do not load