You have all seen some very beautiful houses. Perhaps they were made of brick or stone, with fine porches, having around them tall shade trees, smooth lawns, pretty flower-beds, walks, and sparkling fountains.

If you visit a nice house, you find that the inside of the house is even more beautiful than the outside. There are nice chairs and sofas in the rooms, rich carpets and rugs on the floors, fine mirrors and beautiful pictures upon the walls--everything one could wish to have in a house. Do you not think such a house nice to live in?

Each of us has a house of his own which is far more wonderful than the best palace ever built. It is not a very large house. It has just room enough in it for one person. This house, which belongs to each one of us, is called our body.

Do you know what a machine is? Men make machines to help them work and to do many useful things. A wheel­barrow or a wagon is a machine to carry loads. A sewing-machine helps to make garments for us to wear. Clocks and watches are machines for keeping time.

A wheelbarrow has a box to carry things in, two handles to hold, and a wheel for rolling it along. Some machines, like wheelbarrows and wagons, have few parts, and it is very easy for us to learn how they work. But there are other machines, like watches and sewing machines, which have many different parts, and it is harder to learn all about them and what they do.

In some ways the body is more like a machine than a house. It has many different parts to do a great many things. We see with our eyes, hear with our ears, walk with our legs and feet, and do many things with our hands. If you have ever seen the inside of a watch or a clock you know how many curious little wheels it has. And yet a watch or a clock can only do one thing, and that is to tell us the time. The body has many more parts than a watch, so the body can do many more things than a watch.

It is more difficult, too, to learn about the body than about a watch. If we want to know all about a machine and how it works, we must study all its different parts and learn how they are put together, and what each part does. Then, if we want the machine to work well and to last a long time, we must know how to use it and how to take proper care of it. Do you think your watch would keep time well if you don’t wind it, or break its wheels?

It is just the same with the human machine we call the body. We must learn its parts, and what they are for, how they are made, how they are put together, and how they work. Then we must learn how to take proper care of the body, so that its parts will be able to work well and last a long time.

Each part of the body that is made to do some special kind of work is called an organ. The eye, the ear, the nose, a hand, an arm or any part of the body that does something, is an organ.

The study of the parts of the body and how they are put together is anatomy (a­nat' -o-my). The study of what each part of the body does, is physiology (phys-i-ol'-o-gy). The study of how to take care of the body is hygiene (hy-jeen).   =^..^=