Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/381

Rh testimony of sagacious physicians that alcoholic drinks and tobacco tend to check the growth of the bones.

"The smoking of cigarettes is especially hurtful to growing boys, because such a habit tends, besides other harmful things, to dwarf the growth of the bones, A well-developed form is something to be prized. No wise boy or girl Vill risk attaining it by indulging in filthy or injurious habits while young."

Under Physical Exercise (page 68) we have:

"—The main object of physical exercise is to get our bodies into such a condition, and to keep them in that condition, whereby the average amount of working power can be utilized at any time without harm to the bodily health. To keep up this amount of physical power and endurance we must be obedient to certain great laws of health.

"One of these laws, which never can be violated with impunity, is that which forbids the use of alcoholic liquors and tobacco. Strong drink and tobacco will put to naught the most elaborate system of physical training.

"Those who train athletes, baseball and football players, oarsmen, and all others who take part in severe physical contests understand this, and rigidly forbid their men to touch a drop of alcoholic drink, or even to smoke or chew tobacco. Experience has proved beyond all doubt that strong drink is a positive injury, either when men are in training for or undergoing contests demanding long-continued physical endurance.

"The same law holds good in the ordinary physical exercises of everyday life. Alcohol and tobacco act as poison to the nerve force which controls the muscles, and thus lessen the amount of muscular power and endurance.

"The demands of modern life call for a sound body rather than a strong body. Neither is possible to those who indulge in alcoholic drinks or tobacco."

In like manner, at the end of every chapter, the effect of alcohol and tobacco, like the refrain of a song, comes in to recall the real motive of the whole. There is a long and essentially accurate account of the origin and formation of alcohol. Another chapter gives experiments to be performed with this fluid. At the end of the book, in an appendix, are twenty pages of notes, collected from all sorts of authorities—some good, some doubtful, some worthless—"concerning the nature and effects of alcoholic drinks and other narcotics." A strong case is there made against these evil agencies, and no testimony in mitigation is allowed or even hinted at. For easy reference the following table of the chapters on alcohol is given (pages 329, 330), which shows the thorough saturation of the work with the alcohol idea: