by listening to a teacher read from a book. The children fail to catch the words, or they attach no meaning to them. Here, for example, are verbatim copies of the exercises in one of the Greenwich schools:
"'Infections are brought on by bad smells, such as small-pox, measles, scarlet-fever, glass-pox, s. c., they are brought on by bad drainerges suers; they must be well ventalated. Infection disease are caught by touching such as charcoal, chloride of lime, etc. Measles, feaver are called disinfectionous because they are catching.—Fainted. If a person as fainted, take her out in the open air lay her down with her head. And do the clothing round the neck and dashed cold water the face and hand and put smelling salts to her nose. Degestion is paines in the head, paines in the stom-ach, bad tempers. From degestion comes consumption, information, head-ache, neuralgia.'
"These exercises may be thought amusing, but it should be borne in mind that every word represents more or less pain to some unhappy child, in endeavoring to recall ponderous words which were without meaning. Education in sanitary matters is desirable, but, as it is conducted at present in public schools, it must injure children's minds by habituating them to the use of words which they can not understand."
In the English official reports we read that "an examination of girls in board schools for prizes offered by the National Health Society, revealed some curious items of information. One reply to Mention any occupation considered injurious to health' was, 'Occupations which are injurious are carbolic acid gas, which is impure blood.' Another pupil said, 'A stone mason's work is injurious, because when he is chipping he breathes in all the chips, and then they are taken into the lungs.' A third says, 'A bootmaker's trade is very injurious, because the boot-makers press the boots against the thorax; and therefore it presses the thorax in, and it touches the heart; and if they do not die they are cripples for life.' With a beautiful decisiveness, one girl declares that 'all mechanical work is injurious to health.' A reply to a question about digestion runs, 'We should never eat fat because the food does not digest.' Another states that 'when food is swallowed it passes through the windpipe'; and that 'the chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart, where it meets the oxygen and is purified.' Another says, 'The work of the heart is to repair the different organs in about half a minute.' One little physiologist replies: 'We have an upper and a lower skin; the lower skin moves at its will, and the upper skin moves when we do.' One child ennumerates the organs of digestion as 'stomach utensils, liver, and spleen'"
In the clever little book compiled by Miss Le Row, entitled
