7 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



time for reading or other means of rescue from mental torpor, are 

 among the causes of loss of mental balance. 



Dr. Elisha Harris, Corresponding Secretary of the Prison Associa- 

 tion of New York, who has made a special study of the criminal 

 classes, says that habitual criminals spring almost exclusively from 

 degenerating stock. Thus, physiological unsoundness is moral decay.. 

 The inference is obvious, and the remedy for criminality from this 

 source stares us in the face. Hygienic methods of living, which, with 

 judicious medical precautions and care, tend toward the prevention of 

 physical degeneration, will tend in an equal ratio to lessen the number 

 of candidates for criminal careers. 



The correctional discipline which is sought after (if not found) in 

 our reformatories and prisons, is not only vastly more expensive, but 

 far less satisfactory, than would be the application of preventive 

 measures. 



Professor Ferris, in a paper on the hygiene of schools,* says : " I 

 can not recall ever having visited a room occupied by forty or fifty 

 pupils that could be said to be properly ventilated ; and, under the in- 

 fluence of impure air, study is irksome and good behavior difficult." 

 Thus in our very schools the seeds of physical deterioration and 

 moral degeneracy are sown in the tender bodies and unresisting minds 

 of these criminals of the future, condemned beforehand foreor- 

 dained by their unhealthful, and hence immoral, surroundings to 

 careers of pauperism and crime. For their future detention and safe- 

 keeping, living mausoleums are built and officered and maintained at 

 an expense in money but grudgingly supplied for properly constructed 

 school-houses, and at a human sacrifice which I will not attempt to esti- 

 mate. The preventive method of dealing with immorality, on the other 

 hand, anticipates the development of the potential offender by effect- 

 ing ameliorations in public and individual health and by methods of 

 education which include moral training ; thus removing many of the 

 predisposing causes of immorality the development of sound minds 

 in sound bodies yielding the necessary product of well-balanced lives. 



Men do not, as a rule, become moral by intuition (although the 

 moral genius, like the musical prodigy, is not unknown), but by patient 

 organization of the moral faculties. The phenomena of vice and crime 

 take place, not from any aberration of the laws of Nature, but in exact 

 accordance with them, since educational neglects and unsanitary con- 

 ditions, with their resulting diseases, lead to imperfect mental devel- 

 opment or to the perversion of normal mental qualities. The develop- 

 ment of moral activities must be recognized as dependent on the 

 same principles as that of other activities, and the human being must 

 be trained in morals as he is trained in athletics, in music, and in the 

 mechanic or other arts. " By dint of forging, one becomes a black- 

 smith," says the French proverb ; while all the talk of all the black- 



* " Book of Ilealth," Malcolm Morris. 



