Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/340

326 It may be that it will be for the advantage of the world deliberately to develop different kinds of men and women in the future. We may get better general results by having brain specialties fostered. We may thus have some families of special aesthetic power, some of mechanical genius, and some of enduring muscular work, just as we have pointers, greyhounds, and sheep-dogs. But even then it would, be more than ever necessary to see that the special strong point did not override and interfere with the general nutritive power and vital energy. In training a greyhound, however anxious the trainer is to get speed, he takes care that the dog is very well nourished while he grows, and he never develops his speed till the growth is nearly done, and the bones are set. He doesn't all the time he is growing run the animal every day. He knows that would spoil the general strength, and shorten the period of greatest activity.

The development of special strong points during the process of the education of children I believe to be of vast importance to the race, but it must be done in accordance with Nature's general laws that govern the development of the organism as a whole. The special education must be accompanied by the general development. It must not be pushed to the extent that it absorbs energy needed for other purposes. I can imagine no more interesting or important problem in education than the successful cultivation of specialties. It is quite certain that as yet it has not been solved or even studied to any extent. If you hear of a young lady now who is very musical, you usually find she has so much music added to the grammar and the French and German. It is as important in education to know what things to omit as to know what things to press. It is enough to make one despair of the inherent reasonableness of human nature to think of the amount of time and toil that are given in Edinburgh to the learning of things for which there is no inherent capacity in the learners; things that go against the intellectual grain, that are learned poorly and with much difficulty, against Nature; and are forgotten at once, in accordance with Nature's laws. Think of the girls who toil at music, who have no inherent musical capacity; of the time that is taken in committing to memory rules of grammar, and doing parsing, the real meaning of which the girls' brains could not comprehend, if they lived till they were ninety; of the labor and sorrow given to acquire languages, by girls whom Nature meant only to speak their mother-tongue; of the futile attempts to take those past the rule of three, whom Nature intended to stop at simple division. The sad thing is that we all know each of those girls could do something or other very well and to some purpose in after-life, if we could only hit on what it is.

I don't want to frighten any one unduly by the list of bodily and mental diseases and defects that are in some cases attributable to wrong methods of education that I am about to refer to. I would beg every