2O On the Campus 



our most efficient teacher. But we have long since ceased 

 to heed Nature. We no longer live natural lives. We 

 are living in ways in the highest degree unnatural and 

 artificial. We shut ourselves in houses. We wear strange 

 swathings and bandages that we call clothing. We eat 

 all sorts of artificial food ; and, worse than all, that which 

 we have not before us in actual presentment as physical 

 fact, we build up in imagination; we excite ourselves 

 with vain longings for things not yet possessed ; we scare 

 ourselves with dreams and visions, and torture ourselves 

 or entice ourselves with ills or pleasures that exist not; 



"We look before and after and pine for what is not 

 And our sincerest laughter with true pain is fraught." 



In fact, most of our individual sorrow in this world, if 

 not all of it, is incident to the fact that while we have 

 turned our backs upon Nature and are civilized, we are 

 not yet enlightened. Nobody has to teach the wild deer 

 or the prairie chicken how to be well ; and our domestic 

 animals would be equally fortunate did we let them alone. 

 Our pristine ancestors must have been once as fine and 

 free as their wild neighbors in the forests. On emerg- 

 ing from the woods a thousand years ago, they must 

 have brought with them to their first contact with civil- 

 ization a tremendous surplus of good health or they 

 would never have come through those dreadful centuries 

 of so-called Christian civilization, the centuries of the 

 later middle ages. In fact we are even now as a people 

 spending that inheritance, with plenty of indications, 

 however, that its sources have begun at length to wane. 



It is one of the essentials of education to learn to be 

 well and happy; and though the sun of human know- 



