towns of England
and Scotland, and, indeed, in such an Irish town as Belfast, would obtain
pupils in plenty, and pupils who would thoroughly profit by what they
hear. The people of these towns are, most of them, specially accustomed
by their own trades to the application of scientific laws. To them,
therefore, the application of any fresh physical laws to a fresh set of
facts, would have nothing strange in it. They have already something of
that inductive habit of mind which is the groundwork of all rational
understanding or action. They would not turn the deaf and contemptuous
ear with which the savage and the superstitious receive the revelation of
nature's mysteries. Why should not, with so hopeful an audience, the
experiment be tried far and wide, of giving lectures on health, as
supplementary to those lectures on animal physiology which are, I am
happy to say, becoming more and more common? Why should not people be
taught--they are already being taught at Birmingham--something about the
tissues of the body, their structure and uses, the circulation of the
blood, respiration, chemical changes in the air respired, amount
breathed, digestion, nature of food, absorption, secretion, structure of
the nervous system,--in fact, be taught something of how their own bodies
are made and how they work? Teaching of this kind ought to, and will, in
some more civilised age and country, be held a necessary element in the
school-course of every child, just as necessary as reading, writing, and
arithmetic; for it is after all the most necessary branch of that
"technical education" of which we hear so much just now, namely, the
technic, or art, of keeping oneself alive and well.

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition of
health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those diseases
specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of townsfolk, exposed
to an artificial mode of life. Surely young men and women should be
taught something of the causes of zymotic disease, and of scrofula,
consumption, rickets, dipsomania, cerebral derangement, and such like.
They should be shown the practical value of pure air, pure water,
unadulterated food, sweet and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man
or woman, who would not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to
his or her neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about
those questions of drainage on which their own lives and th