and wrong eating, having been absent from college a year or two, who has been advised by us how to get out of the trouble, and in four months has been recuperated, with ten pounds additional weight, going back to college rejuvenated, to continue his course of study.

We would therefore urge upon teachers, parents, and pupils, a temperate and judicious form of eating. It is not so strange that students overstudy in college, or reach results equivalent to it, especially when their habits of diet, to say nothing of stimulants and tobacco, are considered.

POVERTY OFTEN A BLESSING.

dyspepsia, and kidney difficulty, and injures the strength of mind, clearness of thought, integrity of memory, and vigor of body. But if children at home are fed in this manner, they get their appetite fixed in that direction, and clamor for it at school; and students are generally supposed to be rather difficult to please as boarders; and sometimes starveling academies and colleges, that need every possible dollar of tuitionmoney to keep going, will seek to secure such board for students as they wish to have, whether it be of the right kind or not. Three-quarters of the teachers know much more about grammar, arithmetic, rhetoric, and logic, than they do about physiology, and very many of Poverty is not a convenience, but it them have dyspepsia from living on is often a great blessing to students in such food as we condemn for students. colleges. Those who have plenty of We have known Presidents and Profesmoney, and can luxuriate, as unresors of colleges, while sitting under our strained youths are sometimes inclined professional hands, open their eyes with to, fail to become scholars, and geneastonishment when we told them that rally leave college with ruined constituwheat ground without sifting is comtions; and it is to the poor that the plete food, and ought to be the bread- world is mainly indebted for distinstuff of workers and thinkers; that guished statesmen, able clergymen, sucthey should in the main avoid the fatty cessful teachers, physicians, engineers, part of meat, and eat less butter by nine-inventors, soldiers, or business men; tenths, and less sugar by nineteen-twen- and in this country, it is not uncommon, tieths than they have been accustomed when the biography of eminent men is to; and that they should avoid spices, being prepared, for the fact to be rebecause they are irritating to the nerv-counted with praise and pride, that the ous system, and destructive of health; subject was obliged to teach school durand, on the contrary, use fruit abun- ing vacations, and perhaps during the dantly, and avoid any other kind of sessions to black the boots of his fellowacid, since fruit acid in its natural students, or saw wood for them to pay state is organic, while vinegar is the his college expenses. Of course, poverty product of decay and poisonous in some prevents such persons from losing time degree. and money in license and licentiousness in various forms. They work, take ample exercise, and are tired enough at night to sleep abundantly, which properly rests and recuperates the nervous system; and they are ready for study or work the next day. It is not their poverty that qualifies them to become

If they do not understand these laws, how shall they be expected to practice them, or to communicate a knowledge

of them to their students?

BROKEN DOWN STUDENTS SAVED.

We have had under our hands many a student, broken down from overstudy

more successful than other students, but it is their poverty which forbids dissipation, keeps them confined to their duties, and leads them to that labor which keeps the system invigorated, the digestion good, the circulation complete, and the brain, as a consequence, clear and

strong.

their parents for their laxity when they become old and wise enough to view the matter correctly. If they are kept straight, and are compelled to carry themselves properly, they will ultimately praise their parents for their fidelity, and imitate their good example.

CONDITIONS OF SCHOLARLY SUCCESS.

Of course, parents feel anxious about Correct habits of living, ventilation, their precious child, their hope and abundance of exercise, and from seven pride; they have tried to set a good to ten hours of sleep would carry nineexample at home; smoking, drinking, tenths of intelligent children into, and and other modes of vice have been sed-through, college with excellent health ulously avoided; yet, while they have and unimpaired constitution. The world kept the outward morals of themselves is coming to know, not fully, perhaps, in and their child uncontaminated, they this generation, that students can be induced in him a feverish state of the thoroughly educated, much better, inbrain and nervous system in the comdeed, than now, and graduated with mon school and preparatory course, and glowing health and vigorous constituby a diet and regimen not favorable to the best of health; so that he is open to temptation on every hand, the moment he is removed from parental restraint, and he sweeps out into the current of that life which dazzles, captivates, and leads astray.

BUSINESS MEN DO BRAIN-WORK.

Men in business are required to think as much as students do in college, and they maintain their health year after year, if they live temperately and properly. If we had a dozen boys to train, and there were no college at hand, we would, if possible, move the family within hearing of the college-bell, and our boys should eat every meal under the parental roof, and be in bed every night at the proper time. We commend the wisdom of those men who move to the vicinity of the college or academy where they wish to educate their children. Young, aspiring, restless, excitable persons, unfitted by age, experience, or culture, are ill-adapted to carry themselves wisely, if they are set free from parental guidance and restraint. Those so set free will blame

tions.

Thus physiology teaches those who would study it, how to take care of the health, how to maintain the brain in vigor, so that study shall be a pleasure and not a snare. But we would emphasize the fact, that if children in the primary departments could be trained in calisthenics and receive object lessons, and have recitations in concert, and look at lessons put up by means of great placards, so that the whole school could see and read them, and not have a book in hand for the first two years, it would make study to them a pleasure and not a burden. The little ones are anxious for motion; watch them as they sport on the green; they are not still at all; and in school, for a year or two, their time should be devoted to sys tematic, calisthenic exercises, marchings, singings, reciting in concert, and looking at objects and listening to explanations. There are schools of this sort, and an improved public sentiment in reference to physiological training, will bring the Kindergarten, the calisthenic school, object-teaching and dia

The late Horace Mann gave a wonderful impetus to education, and if he could have been listened to thoroughly, the educational systems

gram-instruction into more general use, and obviate many of the evils of early training and education now prevalent. Children sometimes get broken down before they are twelve years old. How would have been carried to a very much many little, blue-eyed, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, thin-faced girls pore over their books and stand at the head of their class, and then in Sunday-school do the same thing! Is it a wonder that we have so few healthy women, when the best of them are thus pushed in their studies, and encouraged to dress wrongly, to eat wrongly, to study wrongly, and thus violate every physiological law? We would have teachers and parents understand these points, and they all should be trained and enlightened together; otherwise the parent will undermine the work of the teacher, or the teacher will fail to carry out the purposes of the best instructed parents.

higher point, and been far more in harmony with physiological law than at present. He induced the construction of the best school rooms the country had seen, and Massachusetts and the country owe to him more to-day, than perhaps to any other man, living or dead; for his work touched the springs of life, and health, and culture. It sought to lay sound and deep foundations for the health of the body and the culture of the mind. But his views were never thoroughly appreciated, nor fully carried out, and he wore himself out in the great work of education.

NELSON SIZER.

FROM

THE OLDEST MEDICAL BOOK KNOWN.

tus," or thrice great, translated, from engraved tables of stone long before buried in the earth, certain sacred characters said to have been written thereon by the first Hermes, the Egyptian god Thoth or Thuti. The books thus produced were deposited in the temples; and the reputation of the king as a restorer of learning lived in history up to the time of the alchemists of the middle ages, who looked upon him as the "father of chemistry;" while his name still exists in our word "hermetical,” commonly applied to a seal through which nothing, however subtle, can pass. Hermes'

ROM the beginning man suffered the penalties of broken physiological law -had his sicknesses and maladies-and resultantly there arose a class of persons who gave their attention wholly or in great part to finding or inventing methods for the relief or cure of the sick. Away back in the ages there were physicians. The ancient Chinese, Hindus, Persians, Egyptians, had their wise men who prescribed for the sick, but of their methods very little of authority has been discovered until recently. The Scientific American publishes an account of an ancient medical treatise which has recently been found in a mummy-writings, according to Clemens Alexandricase at Thebes, the revelations of which are exceedingly interesting, as they show the condition of the healing art in the days of Egyptian glory.

Fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, at a period when the Israelites were still in bondage in Egypt, Hermes, a king of that country, and surnamed "Trismegis

nus, who described them in chronicles written 200 years after Christ, consisted of forty-two books, all of which were held by the Egyptians in the highest veneration. They treated of rules by which the king was to govern, of astronomy, cosmogony, and geography, of religion and of priesthood, and of medicine. On the last-men

tioned subject, six books are known to have German archæologist, while residing in the existed. Though many scrolls have been vicinity of Thebes, learned from an Arab of found treating on all of the above topics, the existence of a papyrus scroll, found bethe Hermetic writings have remained undis- tween the bones of a mummy, some fourcovered; and hence their very existence has teen years previously, by a person since

FAC-SIMILE OF A PART OF HERMES TRISMEGISTUS' BOOK ON MEDICINE.

repeatedly been denied, and the tradition | dead. By dint of a large offer, Ebers ob

considered as one of the many curious tained the scroll from the Arab. It conmyths which overhang the ancient history of mysterious Egypt.

sisted of a single sheet of yellow brown papyrus, of the finest quality, over sixty

During the winter of 1872-3, Ebers, the feet in length and about eleven inches broad.