446 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Foremost among the evils which are thus presented to him are those 

 conditions of disease known as ansemia and cachexia. Strictly, these 

 are not diseases like diabetes, bronchitis, or defined affections having 

 a regular course, but they are states of diseased form, which by their 

 presence indicate a faulty nutrition at the period of life when good 

 nutrition is most required, and which can not long go on without 

 insuring the construction of an impaired bodily organization. The 

 blood is not being duly oxygenated, and food, therefore, though it 

 even be fair in quality or quantity, is not properly applied. The nerv- 

 ous system is imperfectly built up ; the skeleton is imperfectly built 

 up ; the muscular system is imperfectly built up and sustained. How 

 can the improvement which is called scholarship be turned to fitting 

 account in such recipients of it ? I watched recently the afternoon 

 working of a large class of scholars, and counted one third of them 

 under the most decisive influence of these conditions of disease. Of 

 the affected, there would not be, in the ordinary averaging of life, 

 twenty years of existence under the course that was being followed. 

 The one saving clause in their case was development by physical 

 training, and that was withheld. The one destroying clause in their 

 case was over mental work, without the physical training, and that 

 was assiduously and regularly supplied. 



With or without the anaemia and cachexia, there is the constitu- 

 tional disease, struma or scrofula, present in these classes. The in- 

 stances of this kind, in varying degrees of intensity, are most numer- 

 ous. This condition, again, is a mal or bad nutrition. It, as much as 

 cachexia and anaemia, with which it is so often allied, is fostered by 

 the prevailing system of mental pressure. 



With these two conditions before the eye, there is to be seen here 

 and there in the classes, of both sexes, but of the girls especially, the 

 specimen of the phthisical or consumptive subject. In a class of fifty 

 I pick out three thus doomed, if their circumstances be not changed, 

 six per cent, certainly a moderate proportion. The disease has not 

 positively developed, but the probability of its developing is all but 

 certain, unless it be checked by the one or only remedial or preventive 

 method freedom from nervous exhaustion, combined with physical 

 exercise in open breathing-space. Such preventives are not supplied, 

 but undue nervous exhaustion and confinement are both supplied, and 

 so the fatal disease is systematically fanned from latency into activity. 



Spinal deformity and irregular construction of the skeleton is an- 

 other condition of disease, or actual disease, readily detectable in these 

 classes. 



Miss Lofing, speaking of her experiences as to the girls which have 

 come under her notice, reports that they are, as a rule, very flat-chested, 

 that there is evidently much spinal distortion, and that lateral cur- 

 vature of the spine is common among them. This, which is equally 

 true in respect to boys, is accounted for by Miss Lofing in terms which 



