5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



they be more safely trusted to the guidance of their protective in- 

 stincts. Don't be afraid that an active boy will hurt himself by vol- 

 untary exposure, unless his chances for out-door play are so rare as to 

 tempt him to abuse the first opportunity. Weather-proof people are 

 almost sickness-proof ; a merry hunting-excursion to the snow-clad 

 highlands will rarely fail to counteract the consequences of repeated 

 surfeits ; even girls who have learned to brave the winter storms of 

 our Northwestern prairies will afterward laugh at " draughts " and 

 "raw March winds." Winter is the season of lung-affections, the 

 larger part of them induced by long confinement in a vitiated atmos- 

 phere ; the part caused by light winter clothes is smaller than most 

 people imagine. I have weathered a good many winters without fur 

 caps and woolen shawls, and I ascribe my immunity to the circum- 

 stance that my guardian made it a rule never to force us to wear such 

 things. The Moslems rarely eat before they have washed their hands, 

 and a rather unscrupulous frontier Turk assured me that in his case 

 the practice had nothing to do with superstition ; it had become a phys- 

 iological habit, whose omission, he had found, would produce a fit of 

 very realistic nausea. In the same way more comprehensive ablu- 

 tions may become a physiological necessity : there are people who 

 owe their sound sleep and other sound things to their inability to 

 go to bed without a sponge-bath. The habit can be formed in one 

 summer. 



The dietetic instincts of a rationally educated person should obviate 

 the necessity of special precautions, but in large cities, where tempta- 

 tions walk in disguise, the welfare of inexperienced children may re- 

 quire additional safeguards. In the first chapter of this series I have 

 enumerated the chief arguments of the vegetarian school. Among 

 the incidental advantages of their system it might be mentioned that 

 a purely vegetable diet is the most effectual precaution against a dan- 

 ger which only in one of its exceptional forms was lately brought 

 home to us by the trichina panic. Flesh-eaters always run a risk of 

 inoculating themselves with the germs of the various diseases which 

 both beef- and man-flesh is heir to, consumption especially, and several 

 disorders arising from the corruption of the humors, by the use of de- 

 cayed or fermented food. Sausage-makers, like trance-mediums, never 

 divulge their trade-secrets, but it is a suggestive fact that, in the Anglo- 

 German cities of this continent, the scrofulous and decrepit old females 

 of the bovine race are known by the name of Bologna cows. Absti- 

 nence from Wurst, boarding-house hash, and mince-pies, may diminish 

 the danger, but abstinence from all animal food is the safer plan and 

 the easier one. If children were restricted to a vegetable or semi-ani- 

 mal diet (milk, eggs, etc.), I doubt if many of them would afterward 

 choose to overcome that instinctive repugnance to flesh-food expressed 

 in the original meaning of the word frugality. The Romans of the 

 Cincinnatian era, though entirely free from Buddhistic scruples, seem 



