Health and Education | Page 8

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 in a passage which
I must quote at length--"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. A LECTURE DELIVERED AT
WINCHESTER, MAY 31, 1869.
Ladies,--I have been honoured by a second invitation to address you
here, from the lady to whose public spirit the establishment of these
lectures is due. 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 apologize if I say many things which
are well known to many persons in this room: they ought to be well
known to all; and 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 work-people. 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.