BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1341 



Ghar" — the Wonder-House! Here indeed was much of the early 

 education of Kim. 



A further essential, from the biologist's point of view, is a vivid 

 knowledge of the elementary conditions of health and happiness; 

 using both these words in a broad organismal sense, including the 

 psychical just as much as the physiological. Much more is meant 

 here than lessons in elementary physiology and psychology, though 

 there must be some of these, always guarding most carefully against 

 the danger of premature analysis and self- vivisection. One wishes 

 rather to cultivate an enthusiasm for vigour, both of body and 

 mind; an awareness of the needs and ways of guidance of life; a 

 knowledge of the common-sense ways of avoiding disease, and 

 gratuitous mistakes; some understanding of the cult of joy, and of 

 the art of forgiving and forgetting; a delight in mental gymnastics 

 and intellectual adventure, as well as of enduring bodily hardness; 

 a letting in of sunlight to kill the microbes that lurk in the dark 

 corners of our being; instruction, in short, in the Art of Life. 



It may be said that our grandfathers and grandmothers got on 

 excellently well without any applied physiology and psychology, so 

 why should we burn our fingers? But it may be doubted if they 

 did get on so well — or even live so long and healthily — as is often 

 supposed. In any case, their attitude to sex, for instance, prolonged 

 a taboo — perhaps the most far-reaching of taboos — which has done, 

 and is still doing, incalculable harm; and which it is for education 

 wisely to rectify. 



Moreover, as regards health and happiness, man's education is 

 and must be ever changing ; for, as compared with animals, he is a 

 restless experimenting creature, seeking out fresh environments 

 and strange functions, always adventuring into the new. He is 

 subject to constitutional, occupational, and environmental dis- 

 eases, which are almost unknown in Wild Nature, but have now to 

 be guarded against. He has few dependable instincts in the strict 

 sense; he has rebelled against Nature's sifting without substituting 

 for it anything adequately searching. And so we muddle on. 



Our son asks us for "bread", and, at great cost to ourselves, we 

 coerce him into accepting a non-nutritive stone — which varies in 

 texture in different schools — as from "Wars of the Roses" or 

 other "period" for dates in history, to "French departments" for 

 geography. Is it true that all this is past? Our son asks us for a 

 "fish" (which indicates Nature Study), and we press upon his atten- 

 tion the value of a serpent, like premature chemistry. He asks us 

 for an egg (history, for instance), and we try his teeth on a scorpion 

 — such as chopped-off joints, of grammar-rules, and stinging tail, of 

 their "exceptions". 



The biologist must press the importance of biological instruction 

 in schools; and this not only because it is organically interesting to 



