Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/835

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PHYSIOGNOMIC CURIOSITIES.
817

3. They would learn in a general but efficient manner the fundamental industrial processes which underlie the more special processes of the common arts.

4. This general but genuine knowledge of materials, forces, and processes, will enable each student to choose, with a fair degree of intelligence, the industry for which he or she is fitted by special taste and power.

5. Such a course would make far easier than now the change from one occupation to another, which must ever remain an incident of growing industries.

6. It would give to each person, as employer, some power to judge of the work of the employed.

7. It would furnish a basis, in intelligence, for general sympathy and appreciation among different classes of workers.

8. The last and greatest good would be the cultivation of the industrial disposition, and the killing out of the absurd idea that our schools are free.

The schools simply represent society organized for the education of its children. Every stroke of work done in these schools has to be paid for, and at the proper time children should understand this fact, and should manifest their gratitude by doing all in their power for the betterment of the schools and the proper equipment of the rooms. This, I conceive, would form a most fitting introduction to the great industrial world, and would go far toward building up that spirit of industry and mutual helpfulness which should form the essential characteristic of the American citizen.

PHYSIOGNOMIC CURIOSITIES.

By FELIX L. OSWALD, M. D.

IF the proper study of mankind is man, it is a remarkable circumstance that the most important departments of that study are still alloyed with such an excessive percentage of spurious elements, and that their exponents persist in identifying their interests with the defense of those apocryphal parts of their doctrine. Hygiene, in the legitimate sense of the word, is simply the art of avoiding sins against the Health laws of Nature, but the proposition to omit therapeutics (poison-mongery, as Dio Lewis used to call it) from the curriculum of a medical college would provoke a worse storm of protest than the first attempt to divorce astronomy from astrology. In points of ethics conservatism is a more than professional duty, yet the Rev. Mr. Freekirk, as well as Bishop Highchurch, and Rabbi Tabernacle, is tolerance in person till you question one of his mythological tenets. Phrenol-