ALIMENTARY EDUCATION OF CHILDREN LABBE. 563 



A number of persons are busy along these lines. Among our 

 students in the course of alimentary hygiene, there are some who 

 have become our collaborators and who through talks, lectures, mo- 

 tion pictures, articles inserted in the great daily papers in Paris and 

 in the Provinces, are ably striving to spread the scientific and eco- 

 nomic information indispensable to knowledge about nutrition. 

 Their work is good and profitable. 



The campaign for nutritional education, of which I have traced 

 the outlines, is directed to the child either directly or through the 

 intermediary of its parents. It is complex, but it is necessary and 

 will not be in vain. All that we do for the children, the future of 

 the race, will bear fruit; the miniature man is endowed with a re- 

 ceptive, intelligent mind, easily molded; he is essentially educable. 

 He acquires good habits as easily as bad ones; he can do a thing 

 hygienically as well as unhygienically. It depends on the environ- 

 ment in which he lives. If he has before him examples of cleanli- 

 ness and good hygiene, he assimilates them ; if he has bad examples, 

 he follows them. At the beginning of life, everything is still on an 

 equal footing with him. He has no innate taste for pernicious 

 things. The child does not like gamey meat; he must have had a 

 long education in bad alimentary habits to give him a taste for it. It 

 is the same for strong alcoholic drinks, which at first offend the deli- 

 cate senses of the young man, just as morphine brings on nausea 

 before creating an artificial paradise. 



If the child has vices, he has acquired them from our example or 

 from the environment in which we live. If he is a drunkard, we are 

 responsible for it. 



Inversely, it is curious to see how easily children acquire hygienic 

 habits. Notice with what abhorrence some children refuse to drink 

 from a glass or eat from a spoon used by another person ; how others, 

 in spite of being greedy, scorn a piece of candy which has fallen on 

 the ground; how all are filled with disgust at the idea of finding a 

 worm in a piece of fruit. Alimentary hygiene taught through ex- 

 ample at this period of life is solidly implanted. Hygienic acts be- 

 come unconscious, almost instinctive, and direct the child's life. 



It is very different with the adult, full of inveterate bad habits 

 and crammed with prejudices ; he is difficult to correct and is never 

 perfectly reeducated. 



Surgeons know well that asepsis can not be learned after a certain 

 age ; it is comprised of reflex acts which have been inculcated in them 

 since the very beginning of medical studies. The cleanliness of a 

 surgeon depends on his first training. It is the same for alimentary 

 hygiene. 



Alimentary education is useful not only to individuals; it is also 

 profitable to the general public. Through it little by little the 



