Household Foes A Book for Boys and Girls

Abstract

MISS RAVENHILL has written this small work with the object of arousing the interests of boys and girls in the practice of daily domestic cleanliness, and at the same time of furnishing them with reasons for this practice. She also aims at indicating the links which should be made to connect school lessons with home habits, and prominence is given to the value of good habits and to the necessity for their constant daily practice. She directs attention to the broad educational value of the subject of “hygiene,” in exercising observation and reason, and in cultivating the habit of tracing effects to their causes. The text of most of the chapters is “dirt”—the dirt of home surroundings, of air, water, and food; and at the end of each chapter references are given to works in which the subject-matter may be further studied and developed, more especially on the practical and experimental side. Young people are slow to learn that there are no rights apart from responsibilities, which in this connection include duties to self, to home, to community, to empire, and to race; it is well, therefore, that Miss Ravenhill devotes her two concluding chapters to “the citizen's power to control dirt, decay, and disease,” and “imperial safeguards against dirt and disease.”