Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/663

Rh ; torpor, malaise, and headache, will result. In this condition study is a task instead of a pleasure; the mind is weak, and the memory can not retain imparted knowledge for any great length of time.

In general terms, it may be laid down as a rule, that much effective study must not be expected from a pupil who is overfed, especially if on rich and stimulating food. Let it not be understood that flesh-meat should be excluded from the diet of the young. By no means; it is only its excess that is objected to. An overfed pupil is indolent, intellectually, not because he may be so inclined willfully, but for the reason that his digestive organs rob his brain, and his blood is charged with effete matter; in figurative phrase, the fire is slow because the stove is filled with coal and choked with ashes.

To recapitulate: The more abstruse studies—mathematics, science, rhetoric—should be taken up during the morning session. The proper time for the forenoon recess is at half-past ten. The lighter or concrete subjects—reading, history, geography, writing, drawing, music—should occupy the afternoon session, commencing preferably at two o'clock. When it begins at half-past one, a recess of ten or fifteen minutes is necessary, preferably the quarter-hour preceding three o'clock. No out-door recess when the weather is inclement. For the younger pupils, short lessons frequently repeated, exercising chiefly the imitative faculty and the memory, should be the rule.



WELL-FORMED foot," says Chapman in "The American Drawing-Book," "is rarely to be met with in our day, from the lamentable distortion it is doomed to endure by the fashion of our shoes and boots. Instead of being allowed the same freedom as the fingers to exercise the purposes for which Nature intended them, the toes are cramped together, and are of little more value than if they were all in one; their joints enlarged, stiffened, and distorted, forced and packed together, often overlapping one another in sad confusion, and wantonly placed beyond the power of service. As for the little-toe and its neighbor, in a shoe-deformed foot, they are usually thrust out of the way altogether, as if considered supernumerary and useless, while all the work is thrown upon the great-toe, although that too is scarcely allowed working-room in its prison-house of leather. It is, therefore, hopeless to look for a foot that has grown under the restraints of leather, for perfection of form; and hence the feet of children, although less marked in their external anatomical development, present the best models for the study and exercise of the pupil in drawing." 