Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/678

 important it is, if we wish to estimate the real amount of brain activity in the twenty-four hours, to inquire into the out-of-school tasks, for while, when looking only at the time-table, we may picture to ourselves a boy comfortably asleep in his bed, he may in reality be engaged in hammering his Greek lines into his brain. The same pupil writes: "The extreme variableness of the work makes it not improbable that some boys (as I did myself at one time) have to work the whole day without intermission (i. e., of course, during whole school-days), and many, especially in winter, work all the evening, from a quarter-past six to ten o'clock, with only an interval for supper."

A teacher of languages in England complains that his son, who is at the grammar-school at, has lessons given him to learn which occupy him until ten at night, A gentleman in Devonshire informs me that his boy brings home from school tasks which frequently keep him up till midnight. At a high-school in a large town, I know that some of the pupils have suffered from overwork; two in one family have recently died from "brain-fever," due, it is considered by a medical man, to this cause. Dr. Fayette Taylor, of New York, has drawn a graphic picture of what the Americans are suffering from intemperance in study, and we should do well to take warning from it. "Girls arrive at twelve or fourteen, and, at the threshold of the most important period of existence, utterly unfitted for passing through it. Excitable, with wide-open eyes and ears for every sight and sound which can excite feeling, vapid and intense in mental activity, with thin limbs, narrow chest, and ungainly back, we meet these twelve-year-old products of civilization going to school with an average of thirteen books under their feeble arms—for I have found by actual count that thirteen is the average number of studies which they 'take' nowadays."

I may here record the hours of a school for girls, which appear to me to exceed what is wholesome, and to be well calculated to lessen their mental elasticity and interfere with their healthy development. These girls rise at 6.25; prayers are at seven, and breakfast at a quarter to eight. Their studies commence at a quarter-past eight and last till twelve, with a break of a quarter of an hour; then dinner, during which silence is enjoined and a book read aloud; then an hour's recreation is allowed. Needlework and school-work follow for two hours; half an hour's recreation succeeds, and then come two hours and a half of study and instruction of various kinds. The next meal after the twelve-o'clock dinner is at half-past six, and this is the last. It is succeeded by half an hour's recreation, and this by half an hour's study. Prayers end the day at half-past eight. Here we have nine and a half hours (including religious exercises) of sedentary occupation, and only two hours and a quarter for recreation and one hour and a half for meals. I think we shall be agreed that a little less school