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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

and was of little use and had but little effect upon their subsequent success.

If boys who learn just enough Greek to pass the entrance examinations do not pursue that study in college and are successful in the courses which they pursue, it would seem to imply that they were prepared to take up those studies without having been examined in Greek, and that Greek was for them an unnecessary requirement, which might have been dispensed with or for which any other study requiring as much time and training might well have been substituted. A slight reduction in the alternatives for Greek would benefit English high schools, and make them legitimate preparatory schools on an equal footing with the classical schools, when both kinds of schools would be benefited by friendly rivalry, and pupils would gain by having two good, equally easy roads open to the college gates. The modern requirements for admission to college seem to have been successful thus far, and as professional instructors we ought to give so promising a plan our encouragement and wait for time to disclose by the numbers who enter under this plan and by their success whether there is a real demand for anything better than the old method, and whether that demand is a reasonable one.

ALCOHOL AND HAPPINESS.[1]

By Dr. JUSTUS GAULE,

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH.

NOT as an ascetic, Dr. Gaule assures his hearers, anxious to debar them from a pleasure, but from their own standpoint, as friend with friends, all interested in increasing the sum of happiness, he wishes to discuss the proposed question. First, where do all the life activities come from? They are, as it were, latent in the body substance, the expression in some form or other of impressions received from without. Every act, of course, destroys substance, which must be replaced. Material taken from outside does this work of rebuilding, and it is of two sorts—one, which is enough like body substance to be readily changed into it and express the same activities; the other, so unlike that if it once finds way into the body in such form as to express its own latent power, it injures or destroys—is poison.

Alcohol belongs to the second class. That it injures can be readily seen in the liver, kidneys, and stomach of a drunkard, and


  1. Synopsis of a lecture given in Berne, the second in a series for the advancement of temperance in Switzerland.