Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/74

64 anabasis in the dog-days to drink your fill at the coldest rock-spring of the mountains.

Bathing in flannel!—I would as soon take ice-cream in capsules. The price of the flannel suit would buy you a season-ticket to a lonely beach.

A disposition to excessive perspiration is often due to general debility, but there is a specific remedy for it. Fill your knapsack with substantials and take a pedestrian trip in midsummer, up-hill, if possible, and without loitering under the shade-trees; in short, give your body something worth perspiring for. After that it will be less lavish of gratuitous performances of that sort. The soldiers of the Legion Étrangère are mostly northmen—Poles, Belgians, and Russians—but upon their return from a year's service in Algiers it takes a long double quick under a Mediterranean sun to drill them into a sweat.

"A catarrh is the beginning of a lung-disease." It would be the end of it if we did not aggravate it with nostrums and fusty sick-rooms.

Somehow or other we must have abused our teeth shamefully before Nature had to resort to such a veto as toothache.

A tooth pulled in time saves nine.

"If you doubt whether a contemplated act is right or wrong," says Zoroaster, "it is the safest plan to omit it." Let dyspeptics remember that when they hesitate at the brink of another plateful.

The digestion of superfluous food almost monopolizes the vital energy; hence the mental and physical indolence of great eaters. Strong headed business-men manage to conquer that indolence, but only by an effort that would have made the fortune of a temperate eater.

A glutton will find it easier to reduce the number of his meals than the number of his dishes.

Highland children are the healthiest, and, even starving, the happiest. "There is no joy the town can give like those it takes away."

Paracelsus informs us that the composition of his "triple panacea" can be described only in the language of alchemistic adepts. Nature's triple panacea is less indescribable—fasting, fresh air, and exercise.

A banquet without fruit is a garden without flowers.

The best stuff for summer-wear: one stratum of the lightest mosquito-proof linen.

"Do animals ever go to the gymnasium?" asks an opponent of the movement cure. Never: they have no time—they are too busy practicing gymnastics out-doors.

Descent from a long-lived race is not always a guarantee of longevity. A far more important point is the sanitary condition of the parents at the birth of the child. Pluck, however, is hereditary, and has certainly a prophylactic, a "health-compelling" influence.

The first gray hairs are generally a sign of dear-bought wisdom.

The "breaking-up" of a pulmonary disease could often be accomplished by breaking the bedroom-windows.