Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/529

Rh average boy will not try to get used to tobacco after being told that he can do so if he will?

The book dwells, wherever there is a chance, upon the evils of alcoholic drinks, but gives, in all earnest, the following bill of fare as suitable for the dinner of a child: "Roast beef, potatoes, squash, bread, butter, salt, water, peaches, bananas, oranges, grapes," but no where is there any advice as to how much of these things should be eaten at one meal. Intemperate eating is considered a matter of small account.

In one place is the following saying: "A good cook has more to do with the health of the family than a good doctor." It might, perhaps, have been well for the writer to quote this saying if it said, "poor doctor" or "many a doctor." A good cook is surely a blessing, but there are good cooks and good cooks as the opinions of different families go, and, while food that has been cooked by a "good" cook may taste well, it may not digest well. Good doctors at the present time not only know what good cooking is, but are able to choose digestible food as well. The above motto is a fair specimen of the sayings which are recklessly put into text-books.

A second book in use states in its preface as one of the reasons why the book should appeal to teachers, "The adaptation of the text to oral instruction, the teacher's work being already arranged." The italics were used to emphasize the fact that the teacher's work has been made easy, and that no particular effort on his or her part will be necessary. This book, with about two hundred and twenty-five pages of text, devotes thirty-seven pages to bones, giving numbers and names in detail, while three and a half pages only are devoted to the subject of food, and twelve to digestion. The front and rear views of the normal skeleton depicted in the book are pictures of deformed skeletons, with lateral curvature of the spine and ill-shaped skulls. An accurate picture for a school-book is evidently not a matter of importance.

This book has pictured, as do other text-books, to magnify the evils of tight-lacing, the skeleton of a well-formed chest with an outline of the body and the skeleton of a contracted (corset-laced) chest with no such outline. The outline in the one case gives the appearance of much expansion, and the absence of it in the other exaggerates the contraction. This method of representation is considered by reliable artists as tricky, and was pointed out to me by an excellent lady teacher of physiology and hygiene, as an unfair way of showing the evil effects of tight-lacing.

A third book, intended for the use of primary schools, is made up of questions and answers; nothing left for the teacher to evolve, nothing for the pupil to imagine or solve. Both teacher and pupil are machines to grind out so much material in an