SCIENTIFIC TEMPERANCE. 343 



combines freely with many other elements besides oxygen, so that 

 we continually liberate it in all sorts of chemical decompositions. 

 Helium, on the other hand, enters into combination most spar- 

 ingly, is therefore scarce, and even when present is, as we have 

 said before, not easy to detect. 



SCIENTIFIC TEMPERANCE. 



By DAVID STARR JORDAN. 



AMONG the exhibits at the Columbian Exposition of 1893 was 

 - a map illustrating the progress of " scientific temperance " 

 in the United States. On this map those States of the Union in 

 which scientific temperance was a compulsory study in the schools 

 were shown in white. Those States which had not yet reached 

 this condition were shaded in black. The Northern States gener- 

 ally were white in color, while dark shades covered much of the 

 region south of the Ohio and Potomac. From this dark area, 

 however, one long black tongue stretched itself to the northward 

 from the Ohio River to Lake Michigan, separating the whiteness 

 of Ohio and the Northeast from that of Illinois and the Northwest. 

 Indiana alone in the North was a stumbling-block in the tri- 

 umphal march of the cause, the only district in which " science " 

 and "temperance " were not hand in hand. 



This map leads one to consider for a moment the educational 

 history of Indiana, and especially the conditions under which in- 

 struction in human physiology becomes changed into " scientific 

 temperance." 



With a view to lessening the cost of school books, the Legisla- 

 ture of Indiana in 1889 passed an act directing the State Board of 

 Education to contract with competing publishers for a uniform 

 series of text-books for the State. By the terms of this law the 

 standards were made high and the prices low, the low prices to be 

 made possible by the large sales of the books chosen. In putting 

 this law into action, the State Board of Education, of which the 

 present writer was a member, made a good deal of interesting his- 

 tory, most of which need not be discussed here. 



In the subject of human physiology the series of text-books 

 chosen as the best was one written for this competition at the in- 

 stance of a local publishing house. The author of this series is a 

 teacher of biology, familiar with methods and results of scientific 

 research, and who has also a large interest in the teaching of chil- 

 dren. In the judgment of the Board of Education, one of the 

 points of superiority in this Indiana series over other works of- 

 fered in competition was the scientific way in which the difficult 



