Child's Health Primer For Primary Classes Part 19

A healthy, happy child, dressed in clothes which are suitable for the season, is pleasanter to look at than one whose dress, though rich and handsome, is not warm enough for health or comfort.

When you feel cold, take exercise, if possible. This will make the hot blood flow all through your body and warm it. If you can not, you should put on more clothes, go to a warm room, in some way get warm and keep warm, or the cold will make you sick.

TAKING COLD.

If your skin is chilled, the tiny mouths of the perspiration tubes are sometimes closed and can not throw out the waste matter. Then, if one part fails to do its work, other parts must suffer. Perhaps the inside skin becomes inflamed, or the throat and lungs, and you have a cold, or a cough.

ALCOHOL AND COLD.

People used to think that nothing would warm one so well on a cold day, as a gla.s.s of whiskey, or other alcoholic drink.

It is true that, if a person drinks a little alcohol, he will feel a burning in the throat, and presently a glowing heat on the skin.

The alcohol has made the hot blood rush into the tiny tubes near the skin, and he thinks it has warmed him.

But if all this heat comes to the skin, the cold air has a chance to carry away more than usual. In a very little time, the drinker will be colder than before. Perhaps he will not know it; for the cheating alcohol will have deadened his nerves so that they send no message to the brain. Then he may not have sense enough to put on more clothing and may freeze. He may even, if it is very cold, freeze to death.

People, who have not been drinking alcohol are sometimes frozen; but they would have frozen much quicker if they had drunk it.

Horse-car drivers and omnibus drivers have a hard time on a cold winter day. They are often cheated into thinking that alcohol will keep them warm; but doctors have learned that it is the water-drinkers who hold out best against the cold. Alcohol can not really keep a person warm.

All children are interested in stories about Arctic explorers, whose ships get frozen into great ice-fields, who travel on sledges drawn by dogs, and sometimes live in Esquimau huts, and drink oil, and eat walrus meat.

These men tell us that alcohol will not keep them warm, and you know why.

The hunters and trappers in the snowy regions of the Rocky Mountains say the same thing. Alcohol not only can not keep them warm; but it lessens their power to resist cold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Scene in the Arctic regions._]

Many of you have heard about the Greely party who were brought home from the Arctic seas, after they had been starving and freezing for many months.

There were twenty-six men in all. Of these, nineteen died. Seven were found alive by their rescuers; one of these died soon afterward. The first man who died, was the only one of the party who had ever been a drunkard.

Of the nineteen who died, all but one used tobacco. Of the six now living,--four never used tobacco at all; and the other two, very seldom.

The tobacco was no real help to them in time of trouble. It had probably weakened their stomachs, so that they could not make the best use of such poor food as they had.

REVIEW QUESTIONS.

1. Why do you wear thick clothes in cold weather?

2. How can you prove that you are warm inside?

3. What makes this heat?

4. What carries this heat through your body?

5. How rapidly does your heart beat?

6. How are you losing heat all the time?

7. How can you warm yourself without going to the fire?

8. Will alcohol make you warmer, or colder?

9. How does it cheat you into thinking that you will be warmer for drinking it?

10. What do the people who travel in very cold countries, tell us about the use of alcohol?

11. How did tobacco affect the men who went to the Arctic seas with Lieutenant Greely?

CHAPTER XIX.

WASTED MONEY.

COST OF ALCOHOL.

[Ill.u.s.tration: N]OW that you have learned about your bodies, and what alcohol will do to them, you ought also to know that alcohol costs a great deal of money. Money spent for that which will do no good, but only harm, is certainly wasted, and worse than wasted.

If a boy or a girl save ten cents a week, it will take ten weeks to save a dollar.

You can all think of many good and pleasant ways to spend a dollar. What would the beer-drinker do with it? If he takes two mugs of beer a day, the dollar will be used up in ten days. But we ought not to say used, because that word will make us think it was spent usefully. We will say, instead, the dollar will be wasted, in ten days.

If he spends it for wine or whiskey, it will go sooner, as these cost more. If no money was spent for liquor in this country, people would not so often be sick, or poor, or bad, or wretched. We should not need so many policemen, and jails, and prisons, as we have now. If no liquor was drunk, men, women, and children would be better and happier.

COST OF TOBACCO.

Most of you have a little money of your own. Perhaps you earned a part, or the whole of it, yourselves. You are planning what to do with it, and that is a very pleasant kind of planning.

Do you think it would be wise to make a dollar bill into a tight little roll, light one end of it with a match, and then let it slowly burn up?

That would be wasting it, you say! (_See Frontispiece._)

Yes! it would be wasted, if thus burned. It would be worse than wasted, if, while burning, it should also hurt the person who held it. If you should buy cigars or tobacco with your dollar, and smoke them, you could soon burn up the dollar and hurt yourselves besides.

Can you count a million? Can you count a hundred millions? Try some day to do this counting. Then, when you begin to have some idea how much six hundred millions is, remember that six hundred million dollars are spent in this country every year for tobacco--burned up--wasted--worse than wasted.

Do you think the farmer who planted tobacco instead of corn, did any good to the world by the change?

REVIEW QUESTIONS.