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Purushariha Siddhyupaya
85
in college laboratories to educate young men in the science of Biology. How very strange and paradoxical it is that by causing death, people wish to learn the science of life.
Costly organizations called Research Institutes for Scientific Investigation, established with the ostensible object of preventing diseases like malaria, leprosy, goitre, cholera, plague, tuberculosis, are rather expensive experiments of doubtful utility, when the cost incurred in maintaining them is taken into consideration. Removing the economic distress of people is a surer method of prevention of disease. The Himsâ committed in the intentional, pre-arranged, determined killing of millions of living beings is certainly gross and serious.
The social and convivial custom of eating from the same dish, biting off from the same fruit, biscuit or cake, and drinking from the same cup is responsible for the spread of many contagious and infectious diseases. Kissing has by medical experts been pronounced to be a dangerous medium of dissemination of disease. The use of tinned provisions, preserved fruits, condensed milk, aerated and bottled waters, ice creams, teas and coffees, and the habit of smoking and drinking contribute in no small measure to bad health and disease.
In European countries, and in Australia the newspapers are full of accounts of ravages to agriculture by birds, beasts and insects, and of discussions of scientific methods for killing these birds, beasts, and insects. One paper says that damage by mice to wheat crops in Melbourne has been worse than what happened in 1917, 15 years ago. Another suggests a poison for the eradication of the dingo and the fox.
The extent of damage, and the possible risk is more the creation of an active imagination, than a dangerous reality. Protect your property certainly; and peaceful means will suggest themselves to you, if you do not permit yourself to be misled by pre-conceived notions of killing, which result from habitual meat-eating, shooting and hunting, and to which all schemes of wilful destruction are attributable. India has been an agricultural country. Its people have been leading a pastoral life. Every household had its cultivated land, and herd of cattle. And India never suffered from such imaginary fears as disturb the western scientist. Mice, rabbits, locusts, monkeys, crows, pigeons, and pests of sorts, have been causing damage to
grain-stores, and yet the produce and stocks have been plentiful. This reminds one of the remarks made by a European lady when she noticed an Indian cooking, and observed that an open fire en tailed much loss of firewood energy, and as every household cooked for itself there was much loss of time and human energy which could be saved by establishing bakeries and restaurants, eating houses, and confectionaries. The remedy suggested is worse than the disease, even if the diagnosis be correct. Mass production of cooked food is really an evil which is responsible for many of the diseases and ill-health, so prevalent in the present age of expensive living and feverish
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