Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/339

Rh thinness, should be at once attended to before it goes too far. The great thing is to stop the beginnings of evil. If a girl has grown a couple of inches a year, then depend upon it she should not study hard, Nature has enough to do in such a case to firm up the body in proportion to its bulk. You want not only growth, but activity, grace of movement, alertness, strength. You won't have these if the girl goes on studying hard while she is growing fast. If growth and increase in weight stop too soon, a wise parent will send off her daughter to the country to run to grass for a time, to see if mental inactivity will restore the body-growth. If she is getting thin, let her live out in the open air, instead of in a school, till her appetite becomes ravenous, and she puts on flesh.

There are three considerations that ought certainly to determine the mode, kind, and amount of the education given to any youth or maiden. These are—1. The hereditary constitution of the brain, including both its strong and weak points; 2. The actual ascertainable mental and bodily qualities and capacities and special tendencies of the child; and, 3. The purposes in life that he or she is destined to accomplish. It is owing to our backward physiological knowledge alone that the two former have not hitherto been taken into account, as they ought to have been, by doctors, parents, and teachers. In regard to heredity, when we know its laws more fully in human beings, we shall be able, by influences brought to bear on development and by appropriate conditions of life, greatly to counteract weak points, and to make strong ones available for the purposes of life. We are now able to do so to a considerable extent in the animal kingdom. Man has for his own purposes developed breeds of carrier-pigeons, race-horses, pointer-dogs, etc. We shall not be able to control the heredity of human beings as we can that of the lower animals, but we can apply conditions of life in a scientific manner for our aims. And, even in regard to the mode in which marriages are arranged, a medico-psychologist can not for a moment admit that young persons of either sex fall in love and assort themselves on no scientific principles. The sympathies and affinities of sex are just as much subject to law as any other part of nature. We doctors have much occasion to know that persons of a nervous heredity and disposition are extremely apt to fall in love with and marry each other. The way in which nervousness of all sorts is thus increased is extraordinary. The educators do their best to foster this tendency in the maidens by brain-forcing. The brilliancy of the results at the time are certainly very tempting.