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.

But we can hardly stop there. After we have taught the condition
of health, we must teach also the condition of disease; of those
diseases specially which tend to lessen wholesale the health of
townsfolk, exposed to an artificial mode of life. Surely young
men and women should be taught something of the causes of zymotic
disease, and of scrofula, consumption, rickets, dipsomania,
cerebral derangement, and such like. They should be shown the
practical value of pure air, pure water, unadulterated food, sweet
and dry dwellings. Is there one of them, man or woman, who would
not be the safer and happier, and the more useful to his or her
neighbours, if they had acquired some sound notions about those
questions of drainage on which their own lives and the lives of
their children may every day depend? I say--women as well as men.
I should have said women rather than men. For it is the women who
have the ordering of the household, the bringing up of the
children; the women who bide at home, while the men are away, it
may be at the other end of the earth.

And if any say, as they have a right to say--"But these are
subjects which can hardly be taught to young women in public
lectures;" I rejoin--of course not, unless they are taught by
women--by women, of course, duly educated and legally qualified.
Let such teach to women, what every woman ought to know, and what
her parents will very properly object to her hearing from almost