394 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



illustrated lately in a busy manufacturing settlement in tlie State 



of Massachusetts. The city of L had erected and equipped a 



costly high-school edifice with a corps of highly paid instructors, 

 to initiate in the more advanced branches of scholarship at the 

 public charge pupils of whom only a minority could hope to 

 utilize these expensive accomplishments in everyday life. All 

 seems to have been regarded with complacency until the charge 

 for an unusually complete ventilating apparatus was encoun- 

 tered. One would have thought that all pupils, whether or not 

 able to solve a problem in differential calculus or to construe a 

 line of Virgil, would have excellent use for their own bodies; 

 but neither this consideration nor the almost infinitesimal mag- 

 nitude of this particular outlay an outlay which, including cur- 

 rent expenses and interest on capital, was about half a cent per 

 occupant daily,* in comparison with the strictly scholastic ex- 

 penses sufficed to reconcile the objectors to such unheard-of ex- 

 travagance ! Poverty of valid arguments was compensated by 

 strength of epithets, and such expressions as " cranky " and 

 " visionary " were freely applied to those who had thought it im- 

 proper that rooms packed with adolescent humanity and seldom, 

 alas ! quite free from victims of contagious diseases, should be 

 unprovided with at least a sufficiency of breathing air. The in- 

 cident showed that even in cultured New England there was 

 a minority fortunately, a minority only not yet emancipated 

 from the mediaeval fantasy f which contemned Nature, and which 

 regarded the soul and the body as hostile entities, both indeed 

 corrupt, but the latter only hopelessly so, and fit only to be " mor- 

 tified " and suppressed. A strange infatuation, surely, to have held 

 its ground for nineteen centuries, in face of the lesson left by the 

 matchless educators of Hellas in the harmonious development of 

 every faculty and every sense ! X 



Communications received within a few months past from vari- 

 ous boards of health and of education ^ have left no doubt in the 



mind of the writer that the incident at L is a typical, not an 



isolated one ; for example, prior to March of this year there was 



* The Annual Report of the School Committee of L (p. 211) gives seven mills per 



capita daily, which the large present attendance reduces to about five mills. 



f Of Asiatic origin. 



\ Considering her rude environments and ruder origin, Greece, of the sixth to the fourth 

 centuries before Christ, still presents the most brilliant exemplification of human progress. 



* With the exception of the United States Bureau of Education publication of the 

 herein-quoted work of Prof. Morrison, the present writer has sought vainly for any Federal 

 statistics bearing on the subject of this paper. Indeed, such would, of course, require a 

 Government appropriation, and schoolroom ventilation does not appear to be a subject of 

 interest in our national councils either legislative or executive perhaps because there is 

 supposed to be no " political capital " in it. 



