PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 59 



to have eschewed animal food for sanitary reasons. Children with a 

 phthisical taint are certainly better off without it. Give them eggs 

 and all the available vegetable fat they can digest, but no flesh nor 

 milk of anyways doubtful origin. Two or three families of moderate 

 means might rent a bit of pasture-land, and divide the milk of a 

 healthy country cow. The sanitary condition of a single animal could 

 be ascertained by any competent farrier, but the control of a whole- 

 sale meat-market will always be more or less perfunctory. 



Principiis obsta is probably the wisest maxim ever expressed in 

 two words, and I believe that the poison-problem will be ultimately 

 solved on that principle. The work of reform must begin in the 

 nursery ; and, under circumstances where we can not keep temptations 

 from our door, we must make our children temptation-proof, inspire 

 them with an indelible abhorrence of drunkenness and poison-slavery 

 of every kind. 



" I still find the Laconic method the shortest," writes a friend of 

 mine, alluding to the Spartan plan of warning boys by the example of 

 a drunken Helot. He used to interest his boy in the modus operandi 

 of alcohol, opium, etc., and then take him out, and, under some pretext 

 or other, drop into a slum-saloon on Saturday night, or a police-court 

 on Monday morning, to give him a practical illustration of his theory. 

 Whenever they saw the poison displayed in an attractive form, on 

 ornamental sign-boards or in the gorgeous bottles of druggists and 

 hotel-keepers, they would study the well-baited trap with a peculiar 

 interest, and go their way rejoicing, as in the possession of an invalu- 

 able secret. The result was that the boy became " aggressively vir- 

 tuous," and used to button-hole visitors in order to lecture them on the 

 causes and consequences of the popular delusion. 



Even city boys do not often contract the nicotine habit till after 

 their twelfth year, and a fit of tobacco-nausea before that time gen- 

 erally induces a forbidding reaction not easy to outgrow. I remember 

 the case of a brutal tavern-keeper who tried to accustom his son to the 

 fumes of Alsatian leaf -tobacco (vulgo Stinkeicitz), and the unexpected 

 result of his last experiment. He took the lad on a stage-coach trip 

 from Colmar to Metz, and induced the postillion to take in a few extra 

 passengers, whom he treated to clay pipes and Stinkewitz. He then 

 closed the windows, and in less than twenty minutes his son turned 

 deadly pale, and would have fainted if he had not found relief in a 

 violent fit of retching. If he had loathed Stinkewitz before, he now 

 dreaded it, and six years after, when he was apprenticed to a tanner, 

 he surprised his master by asking, as for a special favor, that they 

 would not force him to smoke leaf -tobacco. Frederick the Great, too, 

 ascribed his abhorrence of the weed to the choking tobacco-fumes of 

 the Wusterhauser club-room, where the boon companions of his awful 

 parent used to indulge from 5 to 12 p. m. It is not necessary to suffo- 

 cate a child with nicotine-fumes, but it can do no harm to take him 



