PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 599 



ther aggravate the evil, each night generally undoes the mischief of the 

 day ; the child becomes plethoric with fat ; Nature has shifted the 

 burden from the vital organs to the tegumental tissues, and in hopes 

 of final relief manages to hold the fort of life against daily and com- 

 plicated attacks. Relief comes at last when the nursling is weaned 

 and reduced from ten or twelve to three meals a day. The after- 

 effects of medication may retard recovery for a while, but, the main 

 cause being removed, the morbid symptoms disappear in the course of 

 four or five months. 



A less frequent but (through gross maltreatment) often more 

 dangerous disease is scrofula, the cachectic degeneration of the hu- 

 mors resulting from the combined influence of unwholesome food 

 and foul air. In the rural districts of our milk and corn-bread States 

 scrofulous children are as rare as white wolves in the tropics ; in 

 Northern Europe the disease is now far less prevalent than formerly ; 

 and the operatives of our large cities, in spite of their wretched habi- 

 tations, might avoid it altogether, or at least obviate its more serious 

 consequences, but for the fatuous quackery which so often turns a tran- 

 sient skin-disease into a chronic lung-complaint. In the middle ages, 

 when science was at its lowest ebb and supernaturalism in full tide, 

 the " king's-evil " was considered an almost unavoidable disease, 

 resisting all common remedies and yielding only to the mandate of 

 royalty the touch of a legitimate king, supplemented by the manda- 

 mus of a clerical exorcist. In the fifteenth century from eight to 

 twelve thousand families per year performed long journeys to the Eng- 

 lish capital ; Charles II, in the course of his reign, touched near a 

 hundred thousand persons. The days on which the miracle was to be 

 wrought were solemnly notified by the clergy of all parish churches 

 (Macaulay's " History of England," Chapter XIY). Traveling was ex- 

 pensive in those days, and, scrofula being distinctively a disease of the 

 poor, nine out of ten patients of the royal doctor had probably come 

 "afoot, and often from distances which suggest the exiDlanation of the 

 marvelous cures : the pilgrims left the pest-air of their hovels behind, 

 and Nature availed herself of the respite, as she improves a temporary 

 change from city fumes to the woodland air of some rural retreat 

 whose salubriousness is ascribed to the accidental presence of a nause- 

 ous sulphur-spring the one abnormal thing about the place. The 

 king's-evil patients, as well as the exorcists, ascribed the cure to what 

 Dr. Joel Brown called the charisma hasilicon the healing touch of 

 the Lord's anointed in other words, they believed that the cure of a 

 Yorkshire man's disease depended upon the chance of the Yorkshire 

 man's coming in contact with a Londoner who, perhaps ten or twenty 

 years ago, had undergone the rites of a certain ceremony. Imagination 

 probably helped a little, for after the spread of skepticism " perfect 

 cures became much less frequent," as Dr. Brown naively remarks. 

 The charisma 'basilicon has now fallen into utter discredit, but our 



