PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 729 



make a winding road from the brick-spring to the hill-top. The road 

 was built, but Pierre indorsed the opinion of a professional engineer 

 that the well-hole, too, would be full of water if the woods of the 

 upper ridge had not been so ruthlessly destroyed and that the replant- 

 ing of forest-trees along the line of the subterranean water-courses 

 would not only replenish the springs but redeem the arid pastures of 

 the foot-hills. The doctor controverted that point, but just for the 

 sake of experiment procured a hundred beech-tree saplings, Avhich 

 Pierre planted and watered with untiring assiduity. Some sixty per 

 cent, of the trees took root, to the unending astonishment of the uncle, 

 who now declared that his confidence in the fertility of the ridge-land 

 had increased to a degree which encouraged him to try his luck with 

 orchard-trees. They procured a lot of young apple, almond, and apri- 

 cot trees, about two hundred of each, and planted them along the line 

 of the suppositive water-courses. Pierre superintended the work, and 

 was kept so busy for the next eighteen months that he had no time to 

 be sick for a single day. The boy that was given uj) by the Antwerp 

 doctors is now a well-to-do horticulturist, able to climb without a stop 

 the steepest ridge in the Ardennes and to fell a forty-years oak-tree in 

 twenty minutes ! 



In the beginning of this chapter I have mentioned two forms of 

 disease which, thus far, have not proved amenable to the hygienic 

 (non-medicinal) mode of treatment, though it has already been ascer- 

 tained that a mild vegetable demulcent sarsaparilla, for instance is 

 as efficacious in those cases as the virulent mercurials of the old school. 

 Antidotes and certain anodynes will, perhaps, also hold their own till 

 we find a way of producing their effects by mechanical means. But, 

 with these few exceptions, I will venture the prediction that, before 

 the middle of the twentieth century, the internal use of drugs will be 

 discarded by all intelligent physicians. 



" If we reflect upon the obstinate health of animals and savages," 

 says Dr. Schrodt, " upon the rapidity of their recovery from injuries 

 that defy all the mixtures of materia medica ; also upon the fact that 

 the homoeopathists cure their patients with milk-sugar and mummery, 

 the prayer-Christians with mummery without milk-sugar, and my fol- 

 lowers with a milk-diet without sugar or mummery the conclusion 

 forces itself upon us that the entire system of therapeutics is founded 

 upon an erroneous view of disease." 



And, moreover, I believe that the chief error can be accounted for : 

 it is founded upon our erroneous view of the cause and cure of evil in 

 general. Translated into plain sj^eech, the foundation-principle of our 

 system of ethics is this : that all natural things, esi3ecially our natural 

 instincts, are essentially evil, and that salvation depends upon myste- 

 rious, anti-natural, and even supernatural remedies. This bottom- 

 error has long biased all our physical and metaphysical theories. The 

 use of our reasoning j^owers is naturally as agreeable as the exercise of 



