hundred years ago, and ask them to consider what it says about education, and especially this passage concerning that mere knowledge which is nowadays strangely miscalled education.  “There are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason.  The one”—that is reason—“commandeth, and the other”—that is knowledge—“obeyeth.  These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, nor age abolish.”  And next I should point them to those pages in Mr. Gladstone’s “Juventus Mundi,” where he describes the ideal training of a Greek youth in Homer’s days; and say—There: that is an education fit for a really civilised man, even though he never saw a book in his life; the full, proportionate, harmonious educing-that is, bringing out and developing—of all the faculties of his body, mind, and heart, till he becomes at once a reverent yet self-assured, a graceful and yet a valiant, an able and yet an eloquent personage.

And if any should say to me—“But what has this to do with science?  Homer’s Greeks knew no science;” I should rejoin—But they had, pre-eminently above all ancient races which we know, the scientific instinct; the teachableness and modesty; the clear eye and quick ear; the hearty reverence for fact and nature, and for the human body, and mind, and spirit; for human nature in a word, in its completeness, as the highest fact upon this earth.  Therefore they became in after years, not only the great colonisers and the great civilisers of the old world—the most practical people, I hold, which the world ever saw; but the parents of all sound physics as well as of all sound metaphysics.  Their very religion, in spite of its imperfections, helped forward their education, not in spite of, but by means of that anthropomorphism which we sometimes too hastily decry.  As Mr. Gladstone says: “As regarded all other functions of our nature, outside the domain of the life to Godward—all those functions which are summed up in what St. Paul calls the flesh and the mind, the psychic and bodily life, the tendency of the system was to exalt the human element, by proposing a model of beauty, strength, and wisdom, in all their combinations, so elevated that the effort to attain them required a continual upward strain.  It made divinity attainable; and thus it effectually directed the thought and aim of man

Along the line of limitless desires.

Such a scheme of religion, though failing grossly in the government of the passions, and in upholding the standard of moral duties, tended powerfully to produce a lofty self-respect, and a large, free, and varied conception of humanity.  It incorporated itself in schemes of notable discipline for mind and body, indeed of a lifelong education; and these habits of mind and action had their marked results (to omit many other greatnesses) in a philosophy, literature, and art, which remain to this day unrivalled or unsurpassed.”

So much those old Greeks did for their own education, without science and without Christianity.  We who have both: what might we not do, if we would be true to our advantages, and to ourselves?

THE TWO BREATHS [49]

Ladies,—I have been honoured by a second invitation to address you, and I dare not refuse it; because it gives me an opportunity of speaking on a matter, knowledge and ignorance about which may seriously affect your health and happiness, and that of the children with whom you may have to do.  I must apologise if I say many things which are well known to many persons in this room: they ought to be well known to all: but it is generally best to assume total ignorance in one’s hearers, and to begin from the beginning.

I shall try to be as simple as possible; to trouble you as little as possible with scientific terms; to be practical; and at the same time, if possible, interesting.

I should wish to call this lecture “The Two Breaths:” not merely “The Breath;” and for this reason: every time you breathe you breathe two different breaths; you take in one, you give out another.  The composition of those two breaths is different.  Their effects are different.  The breath which has been breathed out must not be breathed in again.  To tell you why it must not would lead me into anatomical details, not quite in place here as yet; though the day will come, I trust, when every woman entrusted with the care of children will be expected to know something about them.  But this I may say: Those who habitually take in fresh breath will probably grow up large, strong, ruddy, cheerful, active, clear-headed, fit for their work.  Those who habitually take in the breath which has been breathed out by themselves, or any other living creature, will certainly grow up, if they grow up at all, small, weak, pale, nervous, depressed, unfit for work, and tempted continually to resort to stimulants, and become drunkards.

If you want to see how different the breath breathed out is from the breath taken in, you have only to try a somewhat cruel experiment, but one which people too often try upon themselves, their children, and their workpeople.  If you take any small animal with lungs like your own—a mouse, for instance—and force it to breathe no air but what you have breathed already; if you put it in a close box, and while you take in breath from the outer air, send out your breath through a tube, into that box, the animal will soon faint: if you go on long with this process, it will die.

Take a second instance, which I beg to press most seriously on the notice of mothers, governesses, and nurses.  If you allow a child to get into the habit of sleeping with its head under the bed-clothes, and thereby breathing its own breath over and over again, that child will assuredly grow pale, weak, and ill.  Medical men have cases on record of scrofula appearing in children previously healthy, which could only be accounted for from this habit, and which ceased when the habit stopped.  Let me again entreat your attention to this undoubted fact.

Take another instance, which is only too common: If you are in a crowded room, with plenty of fire and lights and company, doors and windows all shut tight, how often you feel faint—so faint that you may require smelling-salts or some other stimulant.  The cause of your faintness is just the same as that of the mouse’s fainting in the box; you and your friends, and, as I shall show you presently, the fire and the candles likewise, having been all breathing each other’s breaths, over and over again, till the air has become unfit to support life.  You are doing your best to enact over again the Highland tragedy, of which Sir James Simpson tells in his lectures to the working-classes of Edinburgh, when at a Christmas meeting thirty-six persons danced all night in a small room with a low ceiling, keeping the doors and windows shut.  The atmosphere of the room was noxious beyond description; and the effect was, that seven of the party were soon after seized with typhus fever, of which two died.  You are inflicting on yourselves the torments of the poor dog, who is kept at the Grotto del Cane, near Naples, to be stupefied, for the amusement of visitors, by the carbonic acid gas of the Grotto, and brought to life again by being dragged into the fresh air; nay, you are inflicting upon yourselves the torments of the famous Black Hole of Calcutta: and, if there was no chimney in the room, by which some fresh air could enter, the candles would soon burn blue, as they do, you know, when ghosts appear; your brains become disturbed; and you yourselves ran the risk of becoming ghosts,