Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/380

348 of text-book makers who have never heard of its laws and principles. It is obscured by the popular demand for its association with hygiene. The knowledge of rules of health is most valuable, but it is not physiology. The real bases on which such practical generalizations rest are never simple, and in most cases they are beyond the reach of elementary text-books. The rules of health ordinarily given are not deduced from physiological laws. They are rather the expression of the experience of the race. Their introduction into books on physiology is perhaps justified by their utility. But their presence interferes with the development of the science. In an ideal educational arrangement hygiene will have a place to itself, and will not crowd out physiology any more than it will chemistry or physics. The anti-alcoholic material demanded in "scientific temperance," in all its various grades, takes all form of scientific impartiality away from the discussion of hygiene, while physiology being mere science is crowded out altogether. In the book in hand all proportion of parts is lost sight of, while the effort to teach physiology as science is virtually abandoned.

If physiology is not wanted in the schools, let us give it up. But if hygiene is to be substituted, let us have it from pure sources. The rules of health should come from those who have made them a life study, using the methods and tests of science. If temperance is the sole important part of hygiene, let us again demand the words of the highest authorities. Let us incite to sobriety by the words of soberness, not by the battle-cries of the Crusaders.

By casting aside the orderly development of the science of physiology we may find place anywhere in our text-books for discussions of alcohol and its effects. In Our Bodies and How we Live we find sixty-seven pages devoted to it out of a total of four hundred and twelve. The corresponding book of the Indiana Series has but two pages in three hundred and one. And in the former work this matter is not gathered together in one place, where it might be disposed of in one lesson, or even omitted by the evil-minded teacher, but it is diffused throughout. the book, so that no topic or discussion is free from allusions to it. In no part of the volume can we escape from the contemplation of the ravages of alcohol.

For example, we have in the description of the bony framework (page 40) a discussion of "the effect of alcohol and tobacco on the bones," as follows:

"Since the bones constitute the framework of the body, a person's form depends upon the size and shape of his bones. The bones grow during childhood and youth; whatever growth one loses during that time can not be afterward made up. It is the