[2] From Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable, by Ernest Crosby. [Illustration: A NAVAHO GRANDMOTHER WITH THE BABY SHE LOVES, AND WHOSE EDUCATION SHE WILL DIRECT.] I would not have it thought that I am opposed to all systematic and book education, even on our present plan or under our present system. My protest is not so wide and sweeping as that. The main propositions upon which I base my opposition are: 1. That we do not pay sufficient attention to the physical health of our students, making health of secondary, tertiary, or quaternary importance, or often not giving it a single thought; leaving it absolutely to regulate itself, when it should be the first, primary, determinate aim and object of all education. This very day upon which I write I sat at a professor’s table. He is a prominent educator in one of the important cities of the West. We were eating breakfast. He was complaining of indigestion. As he ate I could see his tongue seamed and coated, and his lips were rough and fevered as with stomach trouble. He helped himself to mush,--four times as much as a healthy man ought to have taken, and in far less time than it has taken me to write this he had “shoveled” it all in and “gobbled” it down. (The words in quotation marks are used thoughtfully, and they more truthfully describe what was the absolute fact than any other words with which I am familiar.) He drank two glasses of milk warm from the cow, and ate French bread which had been heated in the oven and then saturated with butter. The night before he had opened a can of sardines,--as he said, “to see what he could eat,” and after the mush he ate a few of them. Then the maid brought in bacon and fried eggs and coffee, and he “did justice” to them. Yet he wondered why he was troubled with indigestion, and his poor wife sent word down from her bedroom that she regretted she could not see me again as she was suffering severely with one of her “regular” sick headaches. My own breakfast consisted of a small quota of mush, some of the hot bread (there was no other), and some cold milk. I felt well and happy after my frugal meal, while he confessed not only to feeling heavy and “logy,” but _unsatisfied_ with what he had eaten--a clear proof of an abnormal appetite and a disordered digestive system. [Illustration: AN AGED COAHUILLA BASKET WEAVER.] Now, is it to be expected that with our teachers themselves so ignorant of the first principles of healthy dietetics our students should know any better? Our whole system of eating is wrong. We eat anything and everything our tastes--often perverted and depraved--demand, and we never ask ourselves the question as to whether the food is good, or our methods of eating it wise and proper. In my chapter on the Indian and diet I discuss this question more thoroughly, but I refer to it in this connection as one of the great defects of our educational system.