all the intellectual and social, as well as the physical advantages, which health, strength, and beauty give.”—­Ah, why is this divine voice now, as of old, Wisdom crying in the streets, and no man regarding her?  I appeal to women, who are initiated, as we men can never be, into the stern mysteries of pain, and sorrow, and self-sacrifice;—­they who bring forth children, weep over children, slave for children, and, if they have none of their own, then slave, with the holy instinct of the sexless bee, for the children of others—­Let them say, shall this thing be?

Let my readers pardon me if I seem to write too earnestly.  That I speak neither more nor less than the truth, every medical man knows full well.  Not only as a very humble student of physiology, but as a parish priest of thirty years’ standing, I have seen so much unnecessary misery; and I have in other cases seen similar misery so simply avoided; that the sense of the vastness of the evil is intensified by my sense of the easiness of the cure.

Why, then—­to come to practical suggestions—­should there not be opened in every great town in these realms a public school of health?  It might connect itself with—­I hold that it should form an integral part of—­some existing educational institute.  But it should at least give practical lectures, for fees small enough to put them within the reach of any respectable man or woman, however poor.  I cannot but hope that such schools of health, if opened in the great manufacturing 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.