Bøger udgivet af PERTHES KLETT

To one who has been an eye-witness of the wonderful achievements of American medical science in the conquest of acute communicable and pestilential diseases in those regions of the earth where they were supposed to be impregnably entrenched, there is the strongest possible appeal in the present rapidly growing movement for the improvement of physical efficiency and the conquest of chronic diseases of the vital organs. Through the patient, intelligent and often heroic work of our army medical men, and the staff of the United States Public Health Service, death-rates supposedly fixed have been cut in half. While it is true that to the public mind there is a more lurid and spectacular menace in such diseases as small-pox, yellow fever and plague, medical men and public health workers are beginning to realize that, with the warfare against such maladies well organized, it is now time to give attention to the heavy loss from lowered physical efficiency and chronic, preventable disease, a loss exceeding in magnitude that sustained from the more widely feared communicable diseases. The insidious encroachment of the chronic diseases that sap the vitality of the individual and impair the efficiency of the race is a matter of increasing importance. The mere extension of human life is not only in itself an end to be desired, but the well digested scientific facts presented in this volume clearly show that the most direct and effective means of lengthening human life are at the same time those that make it more livable and add to its power and capacity for achievement. Many years ago, Disraeli, keenly alive to influences affecting national prosperity, stated: "Public Health is the foundation on which reposes the happiness of the people and the power of a country. The care of the public health is the first duty of a statesman." It may well be claimed that the care of individual and family health is the first and most patriotic duty of a citizen. These are the considerations that have influenced me to co-operate with the life extension movement, and to commend this volume to the earnest consideration of all who desire authoritative guidance in improving their own physical condition or in making effective the knowledge now available for bringing health and happiness to our people.

Any honest inquiry into the Primal Instincts of humanity will necessarily lead to a clearer understanding of their nature, their functions, and their potentialities, and so will help to pave the way for the appearance of a healthier and happier race of men. The dictum "Learn to know yourself," inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, has never been of more vital importance, both individually and nationally, than it is to-day, and the various schools of modern psychological thought, which are steadily opening up those hitherto scarcely explored regions whence flow the springs of human actions, are gradually clearing away the ignorance which has been the real cause of so much disease and distress. The following chapters are to be welcomed particularly as an effort at the constructional reform of our treatment of one of our deepest and most powerful instincts. Even those who do not necessarily give assent to all the details in the line of argument therein pursued must surely approve the insistence upon the vital necessity of there being love in all sex relationships. The word "sexual," though indispensable perhaps in such a book as this, invariably induces some measure of opposition by reason of the associations which it calls up, and so is often replaced by the cognate adjective "racial," which emphasizes the wider aims of Race Preservation rather than the narrower matter of the reproduction of individuals. It is not a matter of curing individual immorality, not even of explaining it only, it is the greater matter of laying a sound foundation for a practicable social morality that is the object of consideration here. It is important that any such opposition should be neither hypocritical nor hyper-critical, for great national issues are at stake. Without the healthy mind there can be no healthy body, at any rate from the point of view of the community, and thus such a scientific inquiry as is set forth in these pages is definitely leading towards the production of a healthier nation. The necessity of there being established a balance between an unlimited self-expression and a rigid self-repression is clearly indicated also, and the importance of self-control is not ignored here as it has been elsewhere, unfortunately, both as regards the individual's physical health and the weal of the community at large; for self-control is a vital essential in the health of a man just as it is a vital necessity for the continuance of a nation. The following pages contain information and suggestions which should tend to the formation of a wiser and more hopeful outlook over the problems of sexual morality, and should therefore receive the careful consideration of all who have the interests of humanity at heart.

"At the extremity of the Red Sea is that famous neck of land called the Isthmus of Suez, which forms a barrier to the Red Sea, and prevents its communication with the Mediterranean. In a preceding article we noticed the reasons which inclined us to think that the Red Sea is higher than the Mediterranean, and that if the Isthmus of Suez was cut, an inundation and an augmentation of the latter might ensue. To which we shall subjoin, that if even it should not be agreed that the Red Sea is higher than the Mediterranean, it cannot be denied that there is neither flux nor reflux in the Mediterranean, adjoining to the mouths of the Nile; and that, on the contrary, in the Red Sea the tides are very considerable, and raise the water several feet, which circumstance alone would suffice to send a quantity of water into the Mediterranean if the Isthmus was broken." "The ocean, therefore, surrounds the whole earth without any interruption, and the tour of the globe may be made from the south point of America; but it is not yet known whether the ocean surrounds the northern part of the globe in the like manner; and all mariners who have attempted to go from Europe to China by the north-east of north-west have alike miscarried in their enterprises." "The water of the Black Sea appears to be less clear and less saline than that of the ocean. There are no islands in it, and its tempests are more violent and more dangerous than in the ocean, because the whole body of its waters being contained in a bason, which has but a small outlet, when they are agitated, they have a kind of whirling motion which strikes the vessels on every side with an insupportable violence." "The lakes any ways remarkable are the Dead Sea, the waters of which contain much more bitumen than salt: it is called the Bitumen of Judea, but is no other than the Asphaltes, which has caused some authors to call it the Asphaltic Lake. The lands which border this lake contain a great quantity of this bitumen; and many have supposed, as the poets feign of lake Avernus, that no fish could live therein, and birds which attempted to fly over it were suffocated; but neither of these lakes produce such mortal events; fish live in both, birds pass over them, and men bathe therein without the least danger."

Set amid Indiana's vast Limberlost Swamp, this treasured children's classic mixes astute observations on nature with the struggles of growing up in the early 20th century. Harassed by her mother and scorned by her peers, Elnora Comstock finds solace in natural beauty along with friendship, independence, and romance. -- Cornfields, soy fields, alfalfa fields - Indiana has long been seen as an agricultural plain. But to make it a lucrative farming state, much of the land had to be deforested, leaving behind devastated habitats. The Limberlost, a wetland in northern Indiana, was mostly destroyed by drainage, logging and oil production. Gene Stratton-Porter, an early 20th-century naturalist and novelist, captured the fading beauty of the swamp in books like A Girl of the Limberlost, a novel about a smart, ambitious girl who lives in the dwindling wetland with her mother and pays for school by collecting local moth specimens to sell to naturalists. The book isn't exactly an environmentalist tract, but it makes the case nonetheless: It celebrates the beauty and richness of the swampland, while showing how easily economic forces push landowners to strip it away.