working well, one part with another, there is a conscious feeling of well-being present. This feeling is the best proof of good health which can exist. There goes with this bien etre a conscious capacity for energizing and a felt power of self-control, which also are proofs of perfect health. Every thoughtful teacher and every parent knows that if self-control could be taught, it would be the copestone of all education, and would itself be proof that the educative process had been on right lines.

It is unquestionably true that an idea commonly exists that during youth the chief thing to be done is to "get well educated." And I should thoroughly agree with that idea if the expression "getting educated" is used in a wide and physiological sense. If its meaning is held to be that every faculty and every function is to be gradually and on sound lines developed up to its full capacity without interfering with the other faculties and functions, so that in the end of the educative process the organism, in all its power, bodily and mental, has been helped to the attainment of its full possible capacity for work and happiness, then I agree that this is the right process to be carried out during youth by every means known to us. Nature could do much of this educative process without any help from the teacher at all. Natural curiosity would incite to the acquirement of much knowledge; imitation would lead the child to copy good manners; muscular energy seeking an outlet would develop mind and limb; experience of natural laws would produce caution and self-control. But that would not be the idea of "education" with most people. It would be the acquisition of reading and writing, of mathematics and classics, of languages and sciences, through school and college teaching. Such an idea of education would cover in most minds the chief idea of what the brain is supposed to do and acquire during youth. This idea I should desire most earnestly to correct and enlarge from the physiological and medical points of view, by pointing out that it is not in harmony with the true conception of the varied work which

the brain has to do during the developmental period of life. If what I have briefly indicated as to the structure and functions of the brain is true, then such an idea of education merely looks to the mental areas of the brain, and forgets the great brain areas that preside over muscular movements and all the power, harmony and grace which their proper development implies, which neglects those that control nutrition and all the beauty and health which a well-nourished organism implies, and takes no account of the brain regions that regulate the digestion and assimilation of food. Putting into continuous and exclusive exercise those mental areas must inevitably withdraw energy from other brain centers and diminish their power of bringthe whole organism to perfection. Lately I met a young woman, a highly educated student, who was just about completing a most brilliant course at college. Her complexion was muddy, her skin was not soft, her movements were ungainly, she could not walk far, she slept badly, and many of the feminine tastes and likings of her age were in abeyance. My conclusions about her were that her mental areas had been made to energize so continuously during her growth and development that they had robbed the other centers of the brain of their due share of energy to do their work. In this young woman's education it had been forgotten that her brain had many other most important functions to do besides "getting educated." The result, in my opinion, did not tend towards her happiness, her usefulness or her chances of living, while it had robbed her of many special and gracious qualities which at her age nature, if not thwarted, bestows on her sex.

Besides such risks as had been incurred in this young woman, through forgetfulness of the fact that the brain has many things to do besides getting educated in youth, there are many others from the same cause. Nature will not commonly allow us to set her laws at defiance without exacting a penalty. No responsible medical man can forget that there are few families without a heredity, stronger

or weaker in different cases, towards some nervous disorder or defect, and that the period of growth and development is that in which such hereditary weaknesses are most apt to show themselves. Beyond any doubt, a serious disregard of the conditions that are favorable to healthy and normal growth tends to bring out latent hereditary defects. Children and youths that, under favorable circumstances, might otherwise have grown up healthy have, through overwork, underfeeding, too little exercise and fresh air, and indulgence in unphysiological practices, become subject to convulsions or paralysis, defects of speech, eye defects, tubercular meningitis, St. Vitus' Dance, asthma, recurrent headaches, dyspepsia, anæmia, consumption, acute rheumatism, moral and intellectual twists, hysteria, and even attacks of adolescent insanity. In addition to this portentous list of actual maladies the risk of stunted growth, lack of grace and harmony of body, and want of beauty, are serious risks to run. Especially in the female sex is there liability to those risks, and the great series of physiological changes at and after puberty have to be considered and provided for in every proper way. Anything that in a woman interferes with future potential motherhood nature especially resents. She will not have her due order interfered with by any attempts, however well meant, to raise the "higher" faculties at the expense of the "lower" bodily functions and capacities. The brain, with its multiform functions, has an organic unity that will not tolerate a continuous disregard of its laws during the critical period of development.

In the struggle for existence, which all living beings have to fight, a certain power of resistiveness to the innumerable and most subtle enemies of life is essential. To be able to resist tubercle germs and disease germs of all sorts a certain organic resistiveness is needed. The brain, above all other organs, supplies this resistive power to the whole body and to every organ of which it is composed. To take the simplest example; the spores of ringworm and

other skin diseases will fasten on the ill-nourished skin of a weakly child with far more virulence than that of a healthy child, and dermatologists now treat such affections in such cases not only by local treatment, but also by brain. tonics. A youth who has overworked his mental functions at the expense of his organic strength is certainly ill prepared to fight the germs of consumption or influenza or typhoid fever or diphtheria, when they attack him.

Last of all, but by no means least important, I believe the disregard of the fact that the brain has many things to do besides the reception of mental impressions in youth leads to a weakening of the great and dominant function of control, of inhibition, mental and bodily. Without a reasonable power of self-control, of inhibition over cravings, appetites and passions, of power to set a-going and keep working the mental and bodily enèrgies, no man or woman is safe, or likely to be of full use in the world as worker or citizen, as son or daughter, as husband or wife, as father or mother. Control cannot be taught merely; it must also, and mainly, be developed. It is the final expression of a strong and harmoniously-working organism, the copestone of a normal organic development and a proper education combined. It represents the ethical and the altruistic principle, without which the family and society could not exist, and religion would be a mere egotistic and selfish sentiment. Without it life would be a regiment without a colonel, a class without a master, a family without a father.

In what I have said there is not a word which should be taken to discourage any teacher or any parent in the education of children. It is not a plea for health and ignorance, but for a wise education. It is a short outlook to think only of the individual in any system of education. The individual soon dies. It is the race we must chiefly look to. Fortunately, there is no incompatibility between the kind of education that is good for the individual and for the race. To be the best for both it must take into account the facts of physiology-of body and mind together, and not apart from one another. T. S. CLOUSTON, M. D. President British Child-Study Association.

ACTUAL SAYINGS OF MY SCHOLARS.

I.

"LIZZIE," said John, meditatively, as he helped me cover

some copy books, "is the best scholar in the room, aint she?-and Leila is the next. The best scholars are most always girls, anyway. I guess teachers like girls better than boys, too, for they're a girl theirself, but they don't know what a boy thinks." Mentally I pleaded guilty. This was thirteen years ago, and I don't know yet! II.

"I hates to have a penny," said little Annie, who was very seldom afflicted that way, "for, whatever I gets with it, I always wishes I'd got something else."

III.

"That hero you've been telling us about," said my biggest colored girl after a history lesson, "is he the same one what we sing about in church when we say 'Hero, my God to thee?'"

IV.

This same girl was always eager for explanations. "When we go to the Junior Endeavor," she demanded one Monday morning, "and they puts us up on the platform and we all says 'Praise the Lord, praise the Lord!' what do them words mean?"

V.

"The longer I lives," is the experience of seven-year-old Jacky, "the more I gits to know."

VI.

"I wish I was a man," sighed ten-year-old Rosa, as she watched some men stringing telephone wires. "Everything people does now they strings more wires, telegraphs, 'lectric cars, 'lectric lights, everything." "But why do you wish you were a man, Rosa?" "So I could go into the wiremaking business," was the practical answer.