t in their studies at entrance,
sixty-two per cent during the first two years, and seven per cent of
failure. The nonsmokers got ninety-one per cent in their entrance
examinations and sixty-nine per cent in their first two years in
college, while only four per cent were failures. In this respect Dr.
Meylan thinks there is a distinct relation between smoking and
scholarship.

Of the same set of students forty-seven per cent of the smokers won
places on varsity athletic teams, while only thirty-seven per cent
of the nonsmokers could get places.

If the next to the last sentence had read, "Smoking therefore seems to
be a cause of low scholarship," what should you think of the reasoning?

30. Criticize the reasoning in the following portion of an argument for
prohibition:

Dr. Williams says, "We find no evidence that the prohibition laws
have in the past been effective in diminishing the consumption of
alcoholic beverages." ... The absence of logic in Dr. Williams's
conclusion will be readily seen by substituting the homicide evil
and the greed evil for the liquor evil in his argument.

Since its establishment the United States has sought to remedy with
prohibition the homicide evil. Every state has laws with severe
penalties prohibiting murder. And yet the number of homicides in
the United States has steadily increased until the number in 1910
was eight thousand nine hundred and seventy-five. Since, then,
homicides have steadily increased during the past hundred years
under a law with severe penalties prohibiting them, a prohibitory
law has not been and cannot be a remedy for homicide.

31. Criticize the reasoning in the following extract from an argument
for the electrification of the terminal part of a railroad:

It is true that locomotive smoke and gas do not kill people
outright; but that their influence though not immediately measurable
is to shorten life cannot, I submit, be successfully combated.... A
few years ago I made some calculations based on the records of ten
years' operation of the railroads in this state, and found that if a
man should spend his whole time day and night riding in railroad
trains at an average rate of thirty miles an hour, and if he had
average good luck, he would not be killed by accident, without his
fault, oftener than once in fifteen hundred years, and that