TEACHING PHYSIOLOGY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 513 



average boy will not try to get used to tobacco after being told 

 that he can do so if he will ? 



The book dwells, wherever there is a chance, upon the evils of 

 alcoholic drinks, but gives, in all earnest, the following bill of fare 

 as suitable for the dinner of a child : " Roast beef, potatoes, squash, 

 bread, butter, salt, water, peaches, bananas, oranges, grapes," but 

 no where is there any advice as to how much of these things 

 should be eaten at one meal. Intemperate eating is considered a 

 matter of small account. 



In one place is the following saying : " A good cook has more 

 to do with the health of the family than a good doctor." It 

 might, perhaps, have been well for the writer to quote this saying 

 if it said, " poor doctor " or " many a doctor." A good cook is 

 surely a blessing, but there are good cooks and good cooks as the 

 opinions of different families go, and, while food that has been 

 cooked by a " good " cook may taste well, it may not digest well. 

 Good doctors at the present time not only know what good cook- 

 ing is, but are able to choose digestible food as well. The above 

 motto is a fair specimen of the sayings which are recklessly put 

 into text-books. 



A second book in use states in its preface as one of the rea- 

 sons why the book should appeal to teachers, " The adaptation of 

 the text to oral instruction, the teacher's tvorh heing alreadij ar- 

 ranged." The italics were used to emphasize the fact that the 

 teacher's work has been made easy, and that no particular effort 

 on his or her part will be necessary. This book, with about two 

 hundred and twenty-five pages of text, devotes thirty-seven pages 

 to bones, giving numbers and names in detail, while three and 

 a half pages only are devoted to the subject of food, and twelve to 

 digestion. The front and rear views of the normal skeleton de- 

 picted in the book are pictures of deformed skeletons, with lateral 

 curvature of the spine and ill-shaped skulls. An accurate picture 

 for a school-book is evidently not a matter of importance. 



This book has pictured, as do other text-books, to magnify the 

 evils of tight-lacing, the skeleton of a well-formed chest with an 

 outline of the body and the skeleton of a contracted (corset-laced) 

 chest with no such outline. The outline in the one case gives the 

 appearance of much expansion, and the absence of it in the other 

 exaggerates the contraction. This method of representation is 

 considered by reliable artists as tricky, and was pointed out to me 

 by an excellent lady teacher of physiology and hygiene, as an un- 

 fair way of showing the evil effects of tight-lacing. 



A third book, intended for the use of primary schools, is made 

 up of questions and answers ; nothing left for the teacher to 

 evolve, nothing for the pupil to imagine or solve. Both teacher 

 and pupil are machines to grind out so much material in an al- 



TOL. XXXIII. — 33 



