Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/459

 mental and physical qualities of every person into faithful harmony and good-will.

I, like some of my colleagues at the School Board, would break up the monotony of the schoolmaster and the schoolmistress, and would give those excellent workers as much variety of teaching as any of them could desire. But that variety should be physical, not mental; play, rather than work; training of the muscles, and, I may say, of the skeleton too; of the lungs, of the heart, of the digestive organs; of brain and nerve for action—not of brain alone, and again brain, and brain, hour by hour, all the day long. I, like others of my colleagues, would encourage economy, not by keeping things as they are, but by saving some part of the two fifths of the money now expended on teaching to spell, and by laying it out in teaching how to walk with grace and ease; to sing with correctness; to swim; to learn the use of the arms, and fingers, and hands; and to become men and women in the strict sense of the word, without danger of retrograding a hair's breadth in the Darwinian line.

I said, in my address at the Health Congress, at Brighton, what was quite true, that I had never in my life seen a healthy child, by which I meant that I had never seen a child that had not in it either some actual or latent constitutional disease. Touching the subject now in hand, it is equally true to say that it is all but impossible to find, in the board schools of our large towns, any semblance, critically viewed, of health. Constitutional taints, which under favorable circumstances may often be concealed, and which may or may not be apparent, are there. Various conditions of disease are there, independently of the tendency from heredity; there of themselves, in some irregularity of body or limb, in some imperfection of sense, in some deficiency of quality of blood, in some feebleness of respiration, in some nervous irregularity of function, in some shade of mental aberration.

The field of disease which is presented in some of the schools situated in crowded localities is indeed a sight at once for anxiety and pity. To the eye of a physician who, like myself, has spent many years in dispensary practice, it tells a story which is absolutely painful, if he permit the results to be calculated out in his mind at leisure hours; if, that is to say, he compares what he has witnessed in his survey with what he has learned, from long observation, of the meaning of the phenomena in the history of life. It is not necessary to strip the children, percuss and sound the chest, examine the spine, or practice any of those refined arts of diagnosis with which he is familiar. He reads from the indications of temperament, of expression of countenance, of color of skin, of position of limb, of build of body, of gait, of voice, sufficient outward manifestation to discern what is the true physical state, what are the stamp and extent of disease, what is the vital value of the lives generally that are before him.