At the Metropolitan School Board on Wednesday, Mrs. Anderson made
an interesting speech in moving for a sub-committee on the sanitary arrangements to be made for the new schools. She said that the children of the poor, so far from being less liable to disease than those of the richer classes, are far more so, and that they are especially liable to chronic affections. Each child should have, in her opinion, 3,000 or 4,000 cubic feet of air every hour, and the warming of the rooms in the cold weather should in general be effected from the floor, as warm feet would be found to be a groat stimulus to intel- lectual activity. It would be essential, too, to look to the ventila- tion, for parents often contract a prejudice against teaching, and ascribe to it the illness of their children, when it is really due to close, unhealthy rooms. She expressed her deep distrust of archi- tects in general on all these sanitary points ; indeed, they not unfre- quently provide for "the main-drain ventilating itself in the basements." It is interesting to have from so good an authority as Mrs. Anderson a direct contradiction of the popular prejudice that hardship makes children "hardy." The truth is, no doubt, that it kills off all the weakly children, and 'selects' the stronger constitutions for maturity.
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