Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/678

662 which I have tried to stir: a larger and more practical recognition of the value and happiness of good national health; a wider study and practice of all the methods of promoting it; or, at least, a more ready and liberal help to those who are striving to promote it. In one sentence, we want the complete fulfillment of the design of this Exhibition, with all the means toward health and knowledge that are shown in it, and with its hand-books, lectures, conferences, and the verdicts of its juries.

We want more ambition for health. I should like to see a personal ambition for renown in health as keen as is that for bravery, or for beauty, or for success in our athletic games and field-sports. I wish there were such an ambition for the most perfect national health as there is for national renown for war, or in art or commerce. And let me end soon by briefly saying what I think such health should be.

I spoke of the pattern healthy man as one who can do his work vigorously wherever and whatever it may be. It is this union of strength with a comparative indifference to the external conditions of life, and a ready self-adjustment to their changes, which is a distinctive characteristic of the best health. He should not be deemed thoroughly healthy who is made better or worse, more or less fit for work, by every change of weather or of food; nor he who, in order that he may do his work, is bound to exact rules of living. It is good to observe rules, and to some they are absolutely necessary, but it is better to need none but those of moderation, and, observing these, to be able and willing to live and work hard in the widest variations of food, air, clothing, and all the other sustenances of life.

And this, which is a sign of the best personal health, is essential to the best national health. For in a great nation, distributed among its people, there should be powers suited to the greatest possible variety of work. No form or depth of knowledge should be beyond the attainment of some among them; no art should be beyond its reach; it should be excellent in every form of work. And, that its various powers may have free exercise and influence in the world, it must have, besides, distributed among its people, abilities to live healthily wherever work must be or can be done.

Herein is the essential bond between health and education; herein is one of the motives for the combination of the two within the purpose of this Exhibition; I do not know whether health or knowledge contributes most to the prosperity of a nation; but no nation can prosper which does not equally promote both; they should be deemed twin forces, for either of them without the other has only half the power for good that it should have.

It is said, whether as fact or fable, that the pursuit of science and of all the higher learning followed on the first exercise of the humanity which spared the lives of sick and weakly children; for that these children being allowed to live, though unfit for war and self-