dry
skin. Whereas, when we are in health, the skin usually feels moist.

Our health is not only endangered, and a foundation laid for fevers,
rheumatisms, and consumptions, by stopping the pores of the skin with
dirt, or anything else, but there is also danger from another and a very
different source.

The blood, in its circulation through the body, is constantly becoming
impure; and as it thus comes back impure to the heart, is as constantly
sent to the lungs, where it comes in close contact with the air which we
breathe, and is purified. But this same purifying process which goes on
in the lungs, goes on, too, if the skin is in a pure, free, healthy
condition, all over the surface of the body. If it is not--if the skin
cannot do this part of the work--an additional burden is thus laid on
the lungs, which in this way soon become so overworked, that they
cannot perform their own proportion of the labor. And whenever this
happens, the health must soon suffer.

The strange belief, that "dirt is healthy," has much influence on the
daily practice of thousands of those who are ignorant of the human
structure, and the laws which govern and regulate the animal economy. It
has probably originated in the well-known fact, that those children who
are allowed to play in the dirt, are often as healthy--and even _more_
healthy--than those who are confined to the nursery or the parlor.

Now, while it is admitted that this is a very common case, it is yet
believed that the former class of children would be still more vigorous
than they now are, if they were kept more cleanly, or were at least
frequently washed. It is not the dirt which promotes their health, but
their active exercise in the open air; the advantages of which are more
than sufficient to compensate for the injury which they sustain from the
dirt. That is to say, they retain, in spite of the dirt, better health
than those who are denied the blessings of pure air and abundant
exercise, and subjected to the opposite extreme of almost constant
confinement.

There is something deceitful, after all, in the ruddy, blooming
appearance of those children who are left by the busy parent to play in
the road or field, without attention to cleanliness. If this were not
so, how comes it to pass that they suffer much more, not only from
chronic, but from acute diseases, than children whose parents are in
better circumstances?

I am the more solicitous to combat a belief in the sa