legant watch delicately adjusted to heat and cold,
should leave it on the sidewalk with cases open on a dusty or a rainy
day, and yet expect it to keep good time? What would you think of a
householder who should leave the doors and windows of his mansion open
to thieves and tramps, to winds and dust and rain?

What are our bodies but timepieces made by an Infinite Hand, wound up
to run a century, and so delicately adjusted to heat and cold that the
temperature will not vary half a degree between the heat of summer and
the cold of winter whether we live in the regions of eternal frost or
under the burning sun of the tropics? A particle of dust or the
slightest friction will throw this wonderful timepiece out of order,
yet we often leave it exposed to all the corroding elements. We do not
always keep open the twenty-five miles of ventilating pores in the skin
by frequent bathing. We seldom lubricate the delicate wheels of the
body with the oil of gladness. We expose it to dust and cinders, cold
and draughts, and poisonous gases.

How careful we are to filter our water, air our beds, ventilate our
sleeping-rooms, and analyze our milk! We shrink from contact with
filth and disease. But we put paper colored with arsenic on our walls,
and daily breathe its poisonous exhalations. We frequent theaters
crowded with human beings, many of whom are uncleanly and diseased. We
sit for hours and breathe in upon fourteen hundred square feet of lung
tissue the heated, foul, and heavy air; carbonic acid gas from hundreds
of gas burners, each consuming as much oxygen as six people; air filled
with shreds of tissue expelled from diseased lungs; poisonous effluvia
exhaled from the bodies of people who rarely bathe, from clothing
seldom washed, fetid breaths, and skin disease in different stages of
development. For hours we sit in this bath of poison, and wonder at
our headache and lassitude next morning.

We pour a glass of ice water into a stomach busy in the delicate
operation of digestion, ignorant or careless of the fact that it takes
half an hour to recover from the shock and get the temperature back to
ninety-eight degrees, so that the stomach can go on secreting gastric
juice. Then down goes another glass of water with similar results.

We pour down alcohol which thickens the velvety lining of the stomach,
and hardens the soft tissues, the thin sheaths of nerves, and the gray
matter of the brain. We crowd meats, vegeta