Notes on Required Readings for January 238 Notes on Required Readings in “The Chautauquan” 239 A Chapter of Blunders 242 Talk About Books 244 Special Notes 245 Sunday-School Normal Graduates, Class of 1884 246 REQUIRED READING FOR JANUARY. TEMPERANCE TEACHINGS OF SCIENCE; OR, THE POISON PROBLEM. BY FELIX L. OSWALD, M.D. CHAPTER IV.—THE COST OF INTEMPERANCE. “Shall we sow tares and pray for bread?”—_Abd el Wahab._[1] If we consider the manifold afflictions which in the after years of so many millions of our fellowmen outweigh the happiness of childhood, we can hardly wonder that several great thinkers have expressed a serious doubt if earthly existence is on the whole a blessing. Yet for those who hold that the progress of science and education will ultimately remove that doubt, it is a consoling reflection that the greatest of all earthly evils are avoidable ones. The earthquake of Lisbon[2] killed sixty thousand persons who could not possibly have foreseen their fate. In 1282 an irruption of the Zuyder Sea overwhelmed sixty-five towns whose inhabitants had not five minutes’ time to effect their escape. But what are such calamities compared with the havoc of wanton wars, or the ravages of consumption and other diseases that are the direct consequences of outrageous sins against the physical laws of God? The cruelty of man to man causes more misery than the rage of wild beasts and all the hostile elements of Nature, but the heaviest of all evils in our great burden of self-inflicted woe is undoubtedly the curse of the poison vice. The alcohol habit is a concentration of all scourges. In the poor island of Ireland alone one hundred and forty million bushels of bread-corn and potatoes are yearly sent to the distillery. The shipment of the grain, its conversion into a health-destroying drug, the distribution and sale of the poison, are carried on under the protection of a so-called civilized government. _Waste_ is not an adequate word for that monstrous folly. If the grain farmers of Laputa[3] should organize an expedition to the sea-coast, and under the auspices of the legal authorities equip an apparatus for flinging a hundred million sacks of grain into the ocean, the contents of those sacks would be lost, and there would be an end of it. The sea would swallow the cargo. The distillery swallows the grain, but disgorges it in the form of a liquid fire that spreads its flames over the land and scorches the bodies and souls of men till the smoke of the torment arises from a million homesteads. We might marvel at the extravagance of the Laputans, but what should we say if the priests of a pastoral nation were to slaughter thousands of herds on the altar of a national idol, and in conformity