The Project Gutenberg eBook, Health and Education, by Charles Kingsley

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Title: Health and Education

Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: December 31, 2005 [eBook #17437]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HEALTH AND EDUCATION***

Transcribed from the 1874 W. Isbister & Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

HEALTH AND EDUCATION

BY THE
REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, F.L.S., F.G.S.
CANON OF WESTMINSTER

W. ISBISTER & CO.
56, LUDGATE HILL, LONDON
1874

[_All rights reserved_]

THE SCIENCE OF HEALTH

Whether the British race is improving or degenerating? What, if it seem
probably degenerating, are the causes of so great an evil? How they can
be, if not destroyed, at least arrested?--These are questions worthy the
attention, not of statesmen only and medical men, but of every father and
mother in these isles. I shall say somewhat about them in this Essay;
and say it in a form which ought to be intelligible to fathers and
mothers of every class, from the highest to the lowest, in hopes of
convincing some of them at least that the science of health, now so
utterly neglected in our curriculum of so-called education, ought to be
taught--the rudiments of it at least--in every school, college, and
university.

We talk of our hardy forefathers; and rightly. But they were hardy, just
as the savage is usually hardy, because none but the hardy lived. They
may have been able to say of themselves--as they do in a state paper of
1515, now well known through the pages of Mr. Froude--"What comyn folk of
all the world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom,
liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folk is so mighty, and
so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?" They may have been
fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini
calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in numbers
slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of natural
selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the
less fit, in every generation, principally by inf