and be content to purchase relative safety at the cost of slow progress, or no progress at all.”  In other words, an advisory medical board should coexist with our board of public education, to try to hold in check or prevent a further “cruelty in trying to be kind.”  Private institutions of education recognize the importance of physical training and development, and in such institutions the deterioration of vision is in proportion less than in institutions where physical training is not considered.  In one school of over 200 middle class girls, Dr. Carter found that, during a period of six years, no fewer than ten per cent. of the total number of girls admitted during that time have been compelled to take one or more terms’ leave of absence, and of the present number twenty-eight per cent. have medical certificates exempting them from gymnastic exercise and 10.25 per cent. of the total present number wear eye glasses of some kind or other.  From my own experience the same number of students in our schools would show about the same percentage of visual defects.  These questions are of such growing importance that not only instructors, but the medical fraternity, should not rest until these evils are eradicated.

[Footnote 2:  Nov. 1, 1890.]

Dr. J.W.  Ballantyne, of Edinburgh, in a lecture[3] on diseases of infancy and childhood, says:  “The education of the young people of a nation is to that nation a subject of vital importance.”  The same writer quotes the startling statement made by Prof.  Pfluger, that of 45,000 children examined in Germany more than one-half were suffering from defective eyesight, while in some schools the proportion of the short sighted was seventy or eighty per cent., and, crowning all, was the Heidelberg Gymnasium, with 100 per cent.  These figures, the result of a careful examination, are simply startling, and almost make one feel that it were better to return to the old Greek method of teaching by word of mouth.

[Footnote 3:  Lancet.  Nov. 1, 1890.]

Prof.  Pfluger attributes this large amount of bad sight to insufficient lighting of school rooms, badly printed books, etc.  One must agree with a certain writer, who says:  “Schools are absolute manufactories of the short sighted, a variety of the human race which has been created within historic time, and which has enormously increased in number during the present century.”  Granting that many predisposing causes of defective vision cannot be eliminated from the rules laid down by our city fathers in acquiring an education, it would be well if the architects of school buildings would bear in mind that light when admitted into class rooms should not fall directly into the faces of children, but desks should be so arranged that the light must be sufficiently strong and fall upon the desk from the left hand side.  My attention has repeatedly been called to the cross lights in a school room.  The light falling directly into the eyes contracts