28 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and was of little use and had but little effect upon their subse- 

 quent success. 



If boys who learn just enough Greek to pass the entrance 

 examinations do not pursue that study in college and are success- 

 ful in the courses which they pursue, it would seem to imply 

 that they were prepared to take up those studies without having 

 been examined in Greek, and that Greek was for them an un- 

 necessary requirement, which might have been dispensed with or 

 for which any other study requiring as much time and training 

 might well have been substituted. A slight reduction in the 

 alternatives for Greek would benefit English high schools, and 

 make them legitimate preparatory schools on an equal footing 

 with the classical schools, when both kinds of schools would be 

 benefited by friendly rivalry, and pupils would gain by having 

 two good, equally easy roads open to the college gates. The 

 modern requirements for admission to college seem to have been 

 successful thus far, and as professional instructors we ought to 

 give so promising a plan our encoura,gement and wait for time to 

 disclose by the numbers who enter under this plan and by their 

 success whether there is a real demand for anything better than 

 the old method, and whether that demand is a reasonable one. 



-- 



ALCOHOL AND HAPPINESS.* 



By Dk. JUSTUS GAULE, 



OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH. 



"'^rOT as an ascetic, Dr. Gaule assures his hearers, anxious to 

 -L^ debar them from a pleasure, but from their own standpoint, 

 as friend with friends, all interested in increasing the sum of hap- 

 piness, he wishes to discuss the proposed question. First, where 

 do all the life activities come from ? They are, as it were, latent 

 in the body substance, the expression in some form or other of 

 impressions received from without. Every act, of course, destroys 

 substance, which must be replaced. Material taken from outside 

 does this work of rebuilding, and it is of two sorts one, which is 

 enough like body substance to be readily changed into it and ex- 

 press the same activities ; the other, so unlike that if it once finds 

 way into the body in such form as to express its own latent 

 power, it injures or destroys is poison. 



Alcohol belongs to the second class. That it injures can be 

 readily seen in the liver, kidneys, and stomach of a drunkard, and 



* Synopsis of a lecture given in Berne, the second in a series for the advancement of 

 temperance in Switzerland. 



