Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 171, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 July 1911 — The Boy PuBBle [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The Boy PuBBle

DR. j.S.KIRJLEy

He and His Habits

A boy needs quite a number of habIta, and he must have them, if he •ver expects to be much of a boy. br to become a man. His body needs the habit of turninc food into blood and (Men blood Into boy. His mind needs the habit of turning sights and sounds into truth and character. His memory is to be merely the good habit of holding on to what he has learned. His morals, at any time, are very largely the sum of his habits tn learning and practising truth and right. When nature equipped him with the power of forming habits, she did him a great kindness, for, without the reinforcement they bring, he would be no farther along the day he dies than he was the day he was born. It is that power which makes it easier to do a thing the second than the first time, still easier each subsequent time. till, by and by. the thing almost does Itself. It really may have a deterrent effect on him to know that he can get used to lying and stealing and drinking and doing every kind of badness and become more and more skillful at it and more Inured to it. through the help of habit Then he win keep his •ye on the dangerous thing. And he can more grow lazy and shiftless and cruel and selfish, or avaricious, when he once starts at It, till he becomes a bundle of vicious habits. Let him know this and also know that he can start tn the right lines and form habits that will be a propeller and a protection and form his. most valuable asset The great Dr. Broadus used to say to his students "Practise makes perfect—bad practise makes perfectly bad!" . ?. ▲ boy has to have help, at first. In Initiating his habits, for he is likely to start some wrong ones. He gets the muscular habit of walking from seeing others walk and from the guidance and support of Lands that show him how to take the first step. He will need some habits, after awhile, that he does not now know he will need and will not start, unless some one gets him at It in a directive way. And he will get some to going that he will find a great injury to him. but he does not know It now; and the most serious thing about It is that he will find It difficult to ever got rid of them, at all. Tot it does seem easy sometimes to give up good habits, while the correction of bad ones is one of the hardest things ever attempted. It seems no task to grow crooked teeth.

but if you undertake to straighten them, the dentist will have to keep all kinds of machinery in your aching mouth, for weary weeks. But the straightening of crooked teeth and pigeon toes and bent backs and cross •yes is easy compared with the reforming habits, when they have become set Those who have looked into the workings of the brain and nerves tell us that, when we think, a certain amount of energy is discharged in the brain, and that energy goes tearing through the nerve tissues, making a path as it goes, and the next discharge of energy will follow that same path, till all of it flows that way. unless we prevent it. Habits make roads and roads must always run tn the right direction and be be built of right material. teven when a good road has been built, some wrong thought may send a discharge of energy in the wrong direction and quickly cut out a new path for the feet of habit. So one has to watch all his life. A habit will live forever. unless it is interfered with. As most of us get some undesirable habIts started we are apt to have the perpetual task of forming good ones and reforming bad ones. The great habit forming time is when he is from five to twelve years old. The. golden, age of memory is from ten to fourteen. Dr. Hawles says that, if one wants to adapt his muscular and nervous habits to the playing of the violin, he must begin before he is ten. I undertook it, after I was thirty, and soon quit. At twelve a boy comes more under the reign of law and of conscience and of his own intelligent will. No one knows when some emergency may arise that will require all the stores of strengtl secured through the aid of habit. Down in Ludlow, Ky„ a deaf old man was crossing the railroad track, when he looked up and saw an engine coming upon him. They had given him the signal but he did not hear and, coming around the curve, they were not able to stop. He did not have time to go on and climb some steps up from the level of the tracks, nor to turn around and go back. He turned a handspring backward and got out of the way, with a few harmless bruises. He did that because his muscles had formed the habit of doing such things, years before. Every good habit the boy forms will be needed in the ordinary tasks or in the emergencies.