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CHAPTER VIII

TAKING HIS MEASURE

"Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

-TENNYSON.

It is the unknowable which has always baffled The most mysterious period in life is the period of adolescence, or the growing time. The chief business of a boy is to grow. Boy stuff is the only stuff in the world from which If the actual process of you can grow a man. growing was as easy as the building of a house, boys would be spared many a “growing pain;" but, alas! the yawning, the stretching, the kicking, the crawling, the climbing, the running, and the resisting he must go through to attain physical stature; then add to all this the mental struggle and the pangs of social adjustment he must undergo in the wonderful phenomena of growing into a man, and you begin to appreciate the seriousness of the process of growth,

which parents fail to understand and scientists have not yet succeeded in making much easier. Two skilled builders, Nature and Nurture, however, are on the job, one as the architect and the other as the worker, a firm, which when in harmony and not on a strike, usually succeeds in making

"Man of soul and body, formed for deeds of high resolve.”

What is a boy? George Allen Hubbell describes him as follows:

"In the language of chemistry, he is a shovelful of earth and a bucketful of water.

"In the language of physics, he is a wonderful machine, a combination of various bands, cords and levers, adjusted in due relation and operating for a specific purpose.

“In the language of physiology, he consists of a bony framework covered with flesh and skin, and supplied with various organs whose functions are to preserve the life of the individual and to perpetuate the species.

"In the language of sociology, he is a unit in the organism of human society and has his specific functions in the life of the social whole, just as the organs of the body have specific functions in the life of the body.

"In the language of psychology, he is a mind manifesting various phenomena, all of which occur in harmony with law.

"In the language of theology, he is the dust of the ground and the breath of God, a spark struck from the divine anvil, a life enclosed in a clod of clay, a son of the Most High, afar from his Father's house, but when true to himself, seeking his eternal home.

"In the language of education, he is a being constituted of body and mind, a bundle of possibilities from which the developments may be marvelous. He is born in weakness, yet destined to strength; promising noble things, yet often falling short of fulfillment. He is the hope of the good and the great."

According to the recent findings of a German scientist, the intrinsic value of the constituent elements of the body of a person weighing 150 pounds is $7.50. This value is represented in the phosphorus, lime, iron, sulphur, and albumen in a body. The fat is worth about $2.50; of the iron there is hardly enough to make even a small nail an inch long. There is enough lime to whitewash a pretty good-sized chicken house. The phosphorus would be sufficient to put heads on about 2,200 matches and the magnesium enough to make a splendid "silver rain" for a firework display. The average human body contains enough albumen for one hundred eggs. There is possibly a small teaspoonful of sugar and a pinch of salt. The whole is worth commercially $7.50.

One does not fancy the human body as an electrical dynamo, but if the heat and muscular energy expended by an average man of sedentary habits were converted into electrical units, he would find himself in possession of quite a val

1 Hubbell, "Up Through Childhood," p. 121.

uable asset. It is proved that a man uses up about two and one-half kilowatt hours of electrical energy in a working day. Approximately onehalf of this amount is used up to keep the temperature of the body constant, while the other half is expended in muscular energy. This amount of electricity may not seem great, but when one considers the things that can be done when it is efficiently applied, the power of the human body is more clearly seen. Two and onehalf kilowatt hours of electrical energy is sufficient to maintain four 25-watt tungsten lamps of twenty candlepower each for twenty-five hours; or heat an electric flatiron for six hours; run a sewing-machine motor for 100 hours; heat an electric toaster for four hours; an electric heater for two hours; an electric curling iron for 100 hours; run a large fan for thirty-two hours, or warm a chafing dish for six hours. All this is accomplished without voluntary effort, and merely comes in the course of the day's work, and does not represent the energy of a laboring man. It is an astounding revelation of the efficiency and endurance of the human machine.

Physicians have measured this complex and ingenious human machine to a dot. A normal boy, fifteen years or more old, has 200 bones and 500 muscles; his blood weighs 25 pounds; his heart is nearly five inches in length and three

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